California Roadtrip!

We drove out to San Francisco at the beginning of the month for one of Dan's mission buddy's wedding. We left on Thursday right after work and drove to Reno, NV. It took us about 8 hours to get there and we stayed overnight. Early the next morning, we finished the drive to Oakland, CA and attend Jeff and Janessa's sealing in the Oakland Temple.

After the sealing, we took pictures around the temple and the temple overlook had a great view of downtown Oakland and San Francisco. The weather was perfect! It was a pleasant 65-70 degrees the entire weekend, although it was a little smoggy.

After the temple, Dan and I chose to go sightseeing in San Francisco since I'd never been there. We drove over the Bay Bridge (we caught a glimpse of Alcatraz, which was kind of cool) and tried to make our way to the Golden Gate Bridge but ended up driving through the Golden Gate Bridge Park and taking random streets trying to find the bridge...Dan insisted that we didn't need a map, but in the end, we wound up on the west side of the city at the Golden Gate Memorial Park. We got some really good pictures of the bridge and we could see seals playing in the water down below.
After all our sightseeing, we tried to leave the city over the Bay Bridge again but there was an accident on the bridge somewhere and we ended up in horrible traffic for over an hour. I did get some interesting pictures of the billboards as we drove by. Don't worry, we went to McDonalds for lunch after.
On Saturday, we drove up to Mt. Rose, which is an extinct volcano/mountain that stands between Reno and Lake Tahoe. The elevation is about 10776 ft and as you can see from the picture, they get a lot of snow. I'm about 5'2 so you can guess how high these poles have to be for the snowplows to see them...

My family and I used to visit Lake Tahoe with friends when I was really little. I don't really remember much about it so I was excited to see it again. We only had time to go to the Lake Tahoe overlook from Mt. Rose but it was still gorgeous! It was much bigger then I expected! We found out that Lake Tahoe is the largest alpine lake in North America and is 22 miles long and 12 miles wide. Pretty impressive!

As soon as we got back to our hotel, I researched a little more about the Lake Tahoe area and found that the TV show Bonanza was filmed there as well as a bunch of other movies. I also got some history on the area. The Lake Tahoe region, Virginia City specifically, is where the Comstock Lode was found. A massive mining area rich in silver that was part of the Gold Rush in the 1850's and 60's. We didn't have time to go see Virginia City but we want to go back and visit again someday.

Dan and I really enjoyed our weekend away and we had a lot of fun sightseeing and exploring!