Five a.m is a heinous time of day, and the rain was hammering down as I,
my roommate, the World’s Greatest Lover and one of the Twins dragged ourselves
down to the Oakland Greyhound station. As a foreigner, many Americans have
taken it upon themselves to protect me, in all my endearing European stupidity. I have been warned against many things:
including firstly, Oakland, and secondly, the Greyhound buses. But
limited funds lead to desperate measures, and so, classically, we arrived for
our bright-and-early five-thirty coach ride an hour early- because the ticket
had told us to do so. The station was deserted asides from the four of us, a
cleaner dozing on one of the benches, and a televised domestic abuse court
case. Ten minutes before the scheduled departure the rest of the, more wizened
travellers, arrived, and we were packed in. I stole a window seat and
watched in fascination as an enormous man with a face and hands covered in
tattoos settled in the seat across from me. I’d been told to watch out for the
greyhound characters. We were shortly after joined by a middle-aged woman with
a bleach job straight from the eighties and leather trousers, who staggered up
and down the aisle for ten minutes shouting ‘IS ANYONE GETTING OFF HERE?’, several
whey-faced couples and families, all due west.  |
| Truckee- It's as attractive as it looks! |
I slept through most of the ride,
apart from a brief interlude in Sacramento, where a blonde fireman started
stripping off in the charred remains of a gutted house and the entire female
contingency of the bus climbed across the aisles to press their noses against
the windows. As we got into the last legs of the we found ourselves high in the
mountains with redwoods on either side, and patchy snowfall- to the delight of one
of the Australians, who had never seen snow before. An hour or so later we
rolled into Truckee, a strip-of-road town. The
shopfronts were all wood and plaster, old fashioned saloon doors, and the road,
stretching into the distant white-capped mountains. After a late breakfast in a
bar with ten rifles and several decapitated deer heads on the walls, we set out
for the next leg of the journey. Our taxi driver was a slim girl in her early
twenties, with knee-high boots, ripped denim daisy dukes and a check shirt.
She looked like she’d fallen straight off the set of the OC, and examined us
curiously. Backpackers, it seemed, were a rarity in Truckee. She had lived
there her whole life, she told us as she navigated the twisted mountaintop
roads, the glass lake stretching beneath us to the Nevada border. People came
and went with the snowfall.
 |
| Emerald Bay |
I was torn the whole journey- torn
between gaping at the crystal expanse of the lake, and cringing in terror as
she pulled out her mobile and chattered blithely away on it, while maneuvering 180
point turns on single-lane roads that wound down the side of a cliff. Driving
and talking-on-phone laws don’t apply so much out here, it seems. But the sight
of the lake was breathtaking, especially as we rounded the mountain to Emerald Bay
with the innocuous-looking castle perched on top of the tiny island. We were then deposited in South Lake Tahoe,
where we embarked on a mega-shop, which included several kilos of potatoes,
oversized bottles of Australian wine,
and a sixteen-pound frozen turkey. The last cab driver appeared in a beaten-up
white van to help ship the two shopping carts-worth of food to our cabin. He
had a magnificent beard, and tangled waist-length brown hair tied in a ponytail
under his baseball cap.
“Will you guys
be stopping long?” He said cheerily, as I climbed in and examined the NRA
sticker on the dashboard. “It’s a lovely spot round these parts..”
It was only a five minute drive
from the main road, and he continued to regale us with stories of the lake as
we bumped along a rough path, past enormous wooden houses with skis stacked up
around the front. “Yeah, an awesome spot, just so peaceful out here in the
woods- GET OUT OF MY ROAD YOU LITTLE ASSHOLES!”
Two rosy-cheeked children
sped past on their push bikes, waving at us.
“Little shits.” The cabbie mumbled,
then “Well folks, here y’are.”
He dropped us at the cabin door and
rolled away, leaving us with ten shopping bags and a small pile of melting snow
on the front porch. We looked around, as the silence enveloped us.
“It’s a real cabin in the woods… What if
zombies come for us?”
“It’s fine.” My roomie unlocked the
door, scraping her feet on the mat. “If
the undead come prowling we’ll just throw the turkey at them.”
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