Adventures of BruteForce: Weekend in Tahoe

Over the weekend, I found myself in North Lake Tahoe (Incline Village) with a sharpshooter, her co-workers, and their significant others. Everything about the trip was taken care of by her company as a team reward for meeting project milestones. Sweet!

When I've gone out to that area in the past, I've pretty much been in South Lake Tahoe, where all the casinos are located. I don't typically do much skiing or snow sports, so I also rarely find myself out there during this time of the year. For those of you not in the know, there's still snow out there. It was still pretty cold with overnight lows in the high 20's.

Anyway, the sharpshooter (we'll get to why she's a sharpshooter in a minute) and I stayed at a condo with one of her co-workers and his girlfriend. A bunch of others stayed over at a semi-baller fully loaded (multiple plasma TV's, full-sized pool table, etc) five bedroom vacation house nearby. We hung out at the house a fair bit, and just drank beers and played a couple of interesting card games.

One was called Wizard, and another one was called Mü. Wizard was fun and simple. I won when we played. Mü was really complex, but it was really a fascinating game. There were 5 natural 'suits' but a 6th suit would be generated from the High and Low trumps, which would vary based on an auction process. It's a bit too complicated to explain here, but if you like strategy card games and know a few others who do as well, I think would likely enjoy the game tremendously. I tied for first in that game, which was pretty coincidental. I would imagine that it's pretty rare to end up in a tie.

Besides being lazy and staying in, we also made a quick trip out to Reno to do a tiny bit of gambling and playing carnival games at the Circus Circus Midway. One of the games at Circus Circus was a Bottle Cork Pistol game. You load up an air gun with a small cork and you'd shoot the cork at empty soda cans. You get 3 shots for a buck. She nailed 2 cans with her 3 shots and won a nice stuffed bear. I played twice, but I only managed to score 0 and 1 (good for a tiny prize). After playing that and other games for a while, we had won a small collection of stuffed animals, including two frogs.

Then, I lost $100 playing blackjack for maybe half an hour. Nothing eventful really. Up $60 at the peak, down $100 at the nadir.

And, what good is a trip without good food? On Sunday night, 11 of us went to do some fine dining at the Lone Eagle Grille. The food was fantastic, and the service was great. I finally got to try some elk, which I've been wanting to try for some time now.

Here are the food pictures...