It might be time

WAHOOO! POWDER! YAAAAMAAAAADAAAAA SPRING BREAK TIME! READY TO GO? Laura picks me up and we take the 4 hour trip to Lake Tahoe to go skiing. Nature is smiling at us, its mid-march and our mountain has just gotten a foot of fluffy white powder snow. The conditions are amazing as we "cut-up" the mountains as the first ones on the slopes. I adjust to skiing in powder but still sometimes am not used to plowing through knee deep powder snow with my skis. Falling face forward I eat snow and lose my skis a couple of times, but THAT'S THE BEAUTY OF POWDER, absolutely nothing hurts. After the trip, Lar takes me to a remote national park and we soak in natural hot springs while the snow falls and 20 Russians soak and talk merrily in the pool. After two full days of skiing, we drive back through quaint mountain towns, see sloping hills covered in massive windmills, and drive through orchards and orchards of almonds, oranges and apple trees all starting to blossom white snowy clusters of flowers.

The hotsprings and the mountain range near Tahoe.

Lar drops me off with Yuko and then Yuko proceeds to take me into the mountains of northern San Francisco where we hike for four hours and my weary muscles cramp several times as we climb up. I'm laughing and crying at the same time through the pain but look to the side and see all of San Francisco from high up. I look down and wildflowers are blooming everywhere. Eagles and condors fly overhead, soaring by the dozen and the air is clean.


Don't you want to move here? Yuko and Lar almost say in unison and in the same tone. They've been waiting for me to move out to CA for four years. It's probably time to start seriously considering the logistics to get out here. But for all the nature and beauty of CA, there's also poor public transportation, a life that revolves around a car, slower (not stupid) people and a different value system that I can't always comprehend. The desire to move out here is great, but I still wonder if the West Coast is really right for an up-tight New Yorker like me. I'm not really sure, but its probably time I check it out.