Lights Out at the Bradley Lodge

Evidently strong winds and lots of snow equal massive power outages. This weekend we had 14.5 (there is a baby on the way) family members at the Bradley Lodge and we were without power for about 25 hours (by far the longest outage we know of, normally if we loose power - which is rare - it is only for a few minutes up to an hour), making do with BBQ Papa Murphy's pizza, using LED lanterns from Target and flashlights to play Catch Phrase and actually taking the time to talk to each other without the Wii or computers on in the background. While the power was out, Luke was still able to play with his cars (as we held flashlights up so he could see and amazingly he can crash cars into one another with or without electricity ... although he didn't really believe us when we said the TV/DVD player would not work).

On Saturday my brother, dad, cousin's husband, aunt and I took a trip to Bear Valley for some skiing/snowboarding, where they did actually have power (not sure if they were using a generator or not, since many cities in the area were powerless). Although it was snowing on us, quite heavily at times, we still managed to have a great time. When we got home we found that Erin had brought "Spud and Tater" to the Lodge to spend time with us, about 1 year ago her husband was about the sit down for dinner with us when he got the call that she was being transferred to UCSF to have the babies sooner than expected, luckily one year later all are doing well.

Sunday a small group of us took a break from football and went to Calaveras Big Trees State Park to explore on our snowshoes. It was quite impressive and I literally took about 100 pictures ... I was also glad to know that a park ranger takes a snowmobile to forge a path in the snow for everyone to follow, otherwise I am pretty sure we would still be lost in the wilderness.