Lake Tahoe, Day 3

The day many thought would never come, did. Five years and three schools after finishing high school, Jonas would actually graduate. The champagne breakfast started early, so Jonas is probably half-lit in this picture. You can't see it here, but Jonas had his hat decorated with "4 4 4", referring to the fact that he was the fourth of four children in his family to graduate from college, and "KT" in reference to a favorite professor who left the college after the administration pressured him to "improve" the grade of a student whose parents were big financial backers of the college. It wasn't too warm outside, but it was very sunny, so the altitude coupled with the hot Nevada sun made the graduation ceremony pretty tedious. In addition to that, the faculty felt the need to make some personal comments about each graduate.

After the ceremony, we posed the various incarnations of Famiglia Saia for the requisite photographs. We're all facing the sun in these, but the people are positioned to block a construction dumpster. In the zoomed-out version of the picture, you can see the white-capped mountains of the Sierra Nevada range behind Lake Tahoe.

Joe, Joe's mom Elsie, Jared, Jared's wife Julia, Jonas, Jordan, Laura's husband Graham, Laura, Dave, Joe's wife Pam, and Tristan, Zoe, And Jennifer in the front. Interestingly, in my family, I'm one of the shortest men, but in Jennifer's, I am the tallest!

After the graduation, we hauled a bunch of stuff, including the deflated bounce house to Burnt Cedar Park. One thing struck me once again about the differences between the East and the West. We brought a gas grill, liquor, beer, and an inflatable bounce house to a public park/beach, and even plugged the bounce house into an outlet on the restroom facility, and nobody said word one about it. I couldn't imagine that happening back East. Everyone is so afraid about liability, that they legislate the fun out of pretty much everything. Anyway, we took a lot of good pictures, and had a lot of food.


After the party, we decided to take a drive through the mountains, so we headed up the Mt. Rose highway, one of the main passes to Reno. There was still plenty of snow and snowmobilers. Here's a picture of Zoe next to some building. We were at ~8300 ft. elevation here. The snow behind (and under) Zoe is probably about 12 feet deep.

We stopped at yet another scenic overlook to take more pictures. Here's a good one Tristan took. Incline Village and Lake Tahoe are directly behind us, about a thousand feet below.

That night The Traveling Roths and Jordan went to Wild Alaskan Outpost Cafe in Incline. We enjoyed an excellent Thai fish soup, and wild salmon. The kids both had Teriyaki chicken rice bowls, and Jordan had the halibut. I highly recommend this restaurant if you're ever in the town.