12 Dec Lake Tahoe

Thanksgiving break is a great opportunity for students to either catch up with their homework of the last months and prepare for the finals. Nevertheless, for most people it is an opportunity just to take a brake from everything related to study books or essays and to shift their focus to just family and friends. I belonged to the latter group. As true lovers of nature, my friends and I booked a cabin at lake Tahoe, and planned to do nothing but beautiful hikes and walks in the woods around the Lake and at the water front.

We left the San Francisco fog (or smog, as the air quality was as bad as in Shanghai in that weekend) on Saturday morning, the 17^th. The trip to Tahoe took us about five hours. It was again a true wake up call of how insanely big this country is: you drive five hours, and you have only covered a small bit of a state, just one state of the 50… In the five hour drive from San Francisco to Lake Tahoe, I could have driven from the east of the Netherlands to west, and back. The size of this country explains its peoples mentality, and life motto: “The land of the free”. I can imagine, if you have so much space around you, it does give you this feeling in your gut that everything is possible.