Back In Time: Kim Is On His Way To Tahoe

The only way of catching a train I ever discovered is to miss the train before.  — G. K. Chesterton

This is the day Kim came up to join me last year. Actually it was a year and a week ago today, because this time I’m up here a week later than we normally came.

In 2006, I started coming up and spending the first two or three days here on my own. When Kim was growing up, his parents had a time share in the area. He wasn’t nearly as enamored of Tahoe as I was — too many memories of being forced to come here as a teen, doing the “family vacation” thing at an age when he wanted to stay home and hang out with friends — so as an adult, he’d start climbing the walls if he was here for more than a couple of days … until we started adventuring and finding our special spots. Then he started wanting to join me sooner and we began staying longer. I used to come for only four days; over time, it extended to eight. Last year, Kim was here for five of them. This year, he probably would have extended it to six.

So our stay grew longer each year as we struggled to fit all our old and new favorites in, and my time alone here grew shorter.

Kim would come up on Amtrak. He loved taking the train! He would send me texts along the way, letting me know where he was and how things were going, sometimes sending photos. But last year, he had Twitter:

Big plan to ride the California Zephyr to Tahoe today and I missed the train by 10 seconds! I was running and they didn’t wait.

Now on the Amtrak capitol corridor, heading to sacramento. From there I have to take a bus.

View of the sf bay from the train is great, one of my favorites.

The bus is taking me on a tour through Roseville. Unexpectedly charming town, hopefully I’ll never be back.

There’s still a lot of snow in the Sierras.

Adding insult to injury, I get off the bus in Truckee just as the CA Zephyr is pulling up to station!

When I picked him up and he pointed at the train sitting there, I told him he should go over and beat that damned conductor up. Right after missing his train, he’d called me and said the ticket person had been on the radio with the conductor, telling him to wait, that Kim was literally on the platform running to get on, and the conductor refused to stop. Bastard!

But hey, if it hadn’t been for that, he wouldn’t have gotten that unexpected tour of Roseville, right?

Yesterday I stayed in the cabin most of the day, though I did make a quick trip to Tahoe City in the afternoon because there are shops I always go in and I wanted to get that out of the way. It was hard being in those places without Kim, especially when I got a latte in the Gear & Grind cafe, which is inside the bike shop where Kim would always hang out while I was furking around in foo-foo places.

Today, I’m planning to head over to Truckee around the time I would have been picking him up at the station. There’s a shop there I always hung out in as I was waiting for him to arrive (the train was NEVER on time, not once), and I want to pick up a couple of things.