Our Family Vacation to Sly Park, part 1

Last Thanksgiving, my Aunt Lol invited us to join her family at Sly Park this summer.  She has a gift of being able to get anyone excited about anything, and much to my great happiness, she talked our family into camping!  This trip was to Sly Park, just over the mountain from Lake Tahoe, CA.  We would stay on the beach of Jenkinson Lake.  She would make all the arrangements, and all we would need to do is get our family there.  Good deal, right?!?

I was thrilled!  I love to camp, but the fam has never been interested.  At long last, we had an opportunity to convince them that camping is actually fun.  The kids LOVE my cousins and their kids, and my dad and my sister's family would be coming, too.  Lol always throws a good party, and I knew we were in for a good time.

The kids and Mike committed, Lol made the reservations (she goes every year with her family and friends, but this year, she was kind enough to schedule it around our family's crazy calendar), and we've spent the last couple of months preparing.  We even bought a rockin'-cool tent!  (This also helped the kids' excitement level.)

We left for California last Sunday morning, stopping in Carson City, NV, where we met up with Care's family and my dad.  In spite of the 9-hour drive, we actually arrived at our hotel within 3 minutes of their arrival!  We spent the evening having dinner together (at Round Table Pizza, a restaurant where our family used to eat when we were kids!) and checking out some cool historical sites.  We even caught a fun concert in the city center park.

Here we are at the historic Carson City Capitol building:

We had a little fun messing around on the grounds.  There was a beautiful park out front, with trees from every county in the state of Nevada.  It was a perfect place to stretch and play after a loooong drive.

The kids finished the evening with a swim, then we got a good night's rest in side-by-side suites.  So fun!