So this year’s Cabin Trip was a bit different from the previous trips. This was our 5th year, and we had a lot of firsts, like:
- 1st time it didn’t snow at any point during the weekend
- 1st time no one went snowboarding (due to the lack of snow & relatively warm weather)
- 1st time staying in South Lake Tahoe (stayed in North West Tahoe area all other years)
- only 15 people went this year, when last year we had 28, and averaged at least 20 the other 3 years.
After last year’s 28, I wanted to book a bigger, and possibly nicer cabin. And I did. It was the nicest cabin we’ve stayed in. It had 5 bedrooms, 3.5 bath, LCD tvs in all the bedrooms, a big L-shaped couch in the living room with a 55” tv, a spacious kitchen, long dinner table that was perfect for beer pong, a hot tub, and a big game room with a full-sized pool table, 55” tv, and (of all things) an Elvis pinball machine, which was surprisingly addictive.
We usually average around 20 people, so that’s what I planned for, and tried (as much as I could) to control the number of people we invited to around that number, since last year it kind of got out of hand. And we had 21, until people started flaking at the last minute. Shann, Daniel, and Alan had legitimate excuses (Shann - 2 midterms on following Monday, Daniel - no one to cover at work on Saturday, Alan - work on Friday night, couldn’t switch shifts). I never found out why Carissa couldn’t go, and then Jay & Owen said they couldn’t go for a number of reasons, which they apparently couldn’t decide on. It was either a.) they had no money cause they had just came back from New York (and from the looks of all their Facebook posts, spent hella money there, or b.) Jay had no gear cause he was letting Cliff borrow his gear for his company trip to Squaw Valley the same weekend. Well, those reasons are more or less BS. Allow me to debunk: a.) money has never stopped him from doing anything he’s wanted to do before. It was $85 a person for the whole trip. A few days before the trip, on Facebook he posted that he signed up for the Hollywood half-marathon, and registration cost $90. I guess that’s were their priorities are; b.) as if he only has 1 set of snowboarding gear. he’s got multiple boards and multiple snowboarding fits. But whatever. For whatever reason, they chose not to go, and they missed out.
But due to the flakers (no, not the f’ing Lakers), we only had 15 (we were lucky that Jacqueline invited June & Christianne at the last minute to get us to15). I had planned on 20 and told everyone the price per person would be $85, which was based on 20 people. So with 5 less people, I was basically had to eat that cost, since I didn’t want to force everyone else to pay $20 more. But I didn’t mind. I got my federal & state tax refunds back, and I just got my Costco AmEx cashback check in, so it really is no biggie.
Despite all that, it was still a fun trip. The first night, we played beer pong, pool, and pinball. At one point, Chris put on the Girls’ Generation 1st Japan Tour blu-ray, and it magically drew everyone’s attention. Soon, everyone was just on the couch gathered around the tv watching the concert. They couldn’t stop watching. Radlee didn’t know their names, so he just started making up his own. Glad to say, we convert everyone into fans. The concert is maybe 2 hours, and we ended up replaying it. They also saw the screen saver on my laptop, which is just short video clips of each member doing random stuff. Radlee and Mark immediately wanted the screensaver on their laptops too.
Tim had work till 11pm, but he still wanted to come up that first night, so we showed up around 2am. And that’s when the real drinking began. We had been drinking beers and taking shots throughout the night, but when Tim arrived, it was just non-stop Jameson shots. He took maybe 8 in row, no chase, in like a 10 min span. So crazy. Funny thing is, on the drive up, me, Haile, and Jaymi were talking about how Tim was hella lightweight. Three years ago on the Cabin Trip, he had knocked out hella early (before we even started cooking dinner), after having maybe two of Mark’s crazy coffee concoction with a “splash” of everclear. But he wasn’t a lightweight this time. I think we drank until maybe 4am. I was kind of worried for him, since we were sharing the room with the bunk beds and he had the top bunk. But luckily, he didn’t yak and was fine the next morning.
Since no one was boarding, we really had no plans for the 2nd day. We just hung around the cabin playing pool & pinball for a while. Then we decided to get out of the cabin, and so we just headed for the state line. We stopped by the lake to take some pictures. Then we went to the Heavenly Village area to eat and walk around.
When we got back to the cabin, we had to started cooking dinner. Since we didn’t have as many people this year, we bought less food, but even still, we had HELLA food left over (didn’t even touch the potstickers, brownie mix, mini pizzas, torilla chips). And I don’t know why, but it seemed like everyone knocked out right after dinner, like we had slipped some sleeping pills into the food or something. And this happens EVERY year, but at least the other years, there’s the excuse that people are tired from snowboarding. We couldn’t use that excuse this year, so I have no idea what it was. So the 2nd night was a lot less tame than the 1st. We turned pool into a drink game, where the losers had to take scooby snack shots, which wasn’t too bad alcohol-wise, but it was really sweet. We played till around 2am before calling it a night.
On our drive back home, we stopped at Mizu’s for lunch. We figured this’ll be our new tradition as long as they’re open. We used to go to Hooters, but dealing with a big group at a sit-down, order-off-a-menu restaurant is always a hassle, and it always took forever for our food to come. Mizu’s is way easier, since it’s a buffet, everyone pays the same price, don’t have to wait for the food, and seating us is way easier. Plus, the food is good, and you can’t go wrong with that.
And that was our 2012 Cabin Trip. Now, on to planning the cousins summer road trip.
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