Well, all I can say is "we survived"! New Year's weekend in South Lake Tahoe was fun but a big adventure to say the least. Here is the story of our adventure...To start off, as soon as I got off the plane in SF from Bozeman, I caught an airport shuttle to my apartment in SJ and immediately started unpacking all my luggage and presents onto my living room floor so that I could repack the few clean clothes that I had left. Once I had repacked, I loaded up my car and drove back to SF to stay at Scott's apartment. We got up on Friday morning and packed up my car with Scott's stuff, our friend Sara, and her stuff. Then we drove up to Sacramento to drop off Sara and pick up two other friends, Robert and Liza, who live up there. The four of us actually crammed all of our stuff and ourselves into my little Honda Civic! Off we drove to Tahoe with the rest of the traffic going there for the popular weekend. The drive up wasn't so bad, timewise, except for the fact that it had been raining ever since Scott and I got off the plane. We got to Tahoe Friday night and checked into the Super 8...which was the only semi-cheap hotel with an open room for the weekend. It still cost us $205 a night and it must have been the crappiest room there. Oh well, we wanted to go someplace we'd never been. Needless to say, the
rain didn't stop all night or morning. Before it was even 11pm, the field in the grass courtyard of the hotel was a lake and some of the bottom floor rooms on the ends were starting to flood a little. Unfortunately, we also had a bottom floor room. We were at the casinos that night, drinking for free, so by the time we got back to the hotel at 3:30am, we were too tired to worry about the rivers of rain flowing past the car parked at the side of the building. By the time we woke up at 10am, our room had started to flood and the water was halfway across. An hour later, when we finally had all our luggage repacked and everything off the floor, there was a good 3 inches of water in the whole room. We opened the door where my car was parked and more water came gushing in. We waded through the ice water that was up to our calves and repacked all our stuff into my car. It was soooo freezing! It was basically just melted snow water! I was so afraid my little car wouldn't make it out of the parking lot and would float away and be ruined. We slowly drove out of the large lake and made it to safety on a higher up main road.
We were dirty, wet, hungry and needed some food in a dry place but IHOP was totally full of people. So we headed over to the only place with breakfast that didn't have a long waiting list - McDonalds. We had brunch, changed our wet clothes, and tried to heal our frozen toes. Good thing was, we got all our money for the room refunded and made it out OK. Bad thing was, we had no room to stay in and both highways back to Sacramento were closed due to flooding, downed powerlines, downed trees, etc. So we drove to the nearest hotel that looked dry and safe, the Holiday Inn and made Scott go in to flirt with the lady at the desk to get us a room. We finally got a room (the only one left because of a cancellation) after a couple hours of wandering around the board shops around Tahoe. It had finally stopped raining mid-afternoon and instead started snowing. All the rivers and lakes disappeared and it was really beautiful.
After we finally got a room and were able to take showers, we thought we'd died and gone to heaven. Whew! After that whole episode, we got rested and had a good New Year's Eve down at the casinos a couple blocks away. We met another group of friends at Caesars and got more free drinks gambling 10 cents at a time on $5. :) Hey, we are all pretty low on money and it was cheap that way. We never got to go into any of the clubs because we didn't want to pay $100-150 cover charges just to get in. It was pretty mellow for a New Year's in Tahoe, but we had more fun when we tried to leave the next day. Because of the disaster, many people opted not to stay any longer and since no one could have left the day before, everyone left the same day. It took us 2 hours just to get from one side of South Lake Tahoe to the edge of Tahoe - only 6 miles! It took a total of 6 hours to go 90 miles over the windy mountain road behind hundreds of other cars. We cheered if we went more than 20 miles an hour. How sad! We stayed another night with Robert 
and Liza in their apartment in Sacramento (more specifically Folsom). We made dinner, vegged out on movies, and thanked the Lord that we made it safe and dry. I guess the storm was pretty bad in other parts of Northern Cali too, because parts of Sacramento and Napa Valley got declared a disaster area by the Governator.
