The other day my girlfriend and I went to Lake Tahoe. It was a spontaneous decision, so naturally, we were about as prepared as a cat in pancake batter (don't worry about the metaphor). As we made our ascent up the mountain, we noticed how snow would gradually accumulate on the trees the further up we went, and then the snow would start to be more and more present on the ground higher up, and eventually we reached a point where the snow was all over the trees and the ground, and then it was on absolutely everything, including the roads upon which we were driving, and then it was in our cars within which we were bickering at each other, and then it was within our bodies inside which we were overloaded with caffeine and anxiety. That's when we stopped and put the chains, which I had never used before that had been sitting in the trunk since my acquisition of the vehicle, on the tires.
This was the first time I had put chains on a tire, so my girlfriend, whom had equivalent experience with snow chains, assisted me in this endeavor. It was a struggle, but we managed, the troopers that we were, and secured the chains to the tires. I suppose, in retrospect, that the real trooper here was the car, for having put up with all of the continuous bullshit we had put it through just to take this highly inefficient and recklessly impulsive trip.
Anyhow, although it is very normal for people to make reservations for a hotel room so they have a destination in mind when they are arriving at their vacation spot, very normal was in no way, shape, or form associated with the circumstances of our little journey. Instead, very normal was being substituted today by a figure by the name of Random Happenstance. Random happenstance, or RannyHae as I like to call it, decided that tonight was the night for us to get caught in a hotel that may or may not have been the final resting place of some unfortunate pioneers that had befallen the unlucky plight of being stranded in a frosty, death zone, forcing the remaining survivors to feed on the then recently deceased.
The tale of the Donner Party is not all a story of people that simply resorted to cannibalism because they had nothing better to do with their time while they were waiting out the winter. It's a sad story of a small portion of the group that struggled to survive in an unforgiving wilderness, and when their options came down to death for all or only the few that have not made it thus far, they decided that survival came first. And survive, a few did, but at the cost of traumatization and irremovable emotional scars.
It was with this in mind, after having made numerous calls to find a hotel with vacancy and finally finding one, that we decided we would go out for a walk in the ice cold streets to find something to eat. Being a small town with limited consumer traffic, there were few places open except for, conveniently enough, a grocery store. We somehow consciously decided that eating BBQ Ribs was the perfect meal after a long walk in the snow, and proceeded to purchase them with an assortment of desserts, compliments of RannyHae. We took them back to the pleasantly cheap, but unpleasantly creepy cabin-like lodging we managed to find after a hefty quantity of searching.
To Be Continued...
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