South Lake Tahoe Family Reunion - Day 1 The Gathering

This year we finally gave up on getting the whole family together in Hawaii.  Our Marriott timeshare still makes all sorts of promises about getting you a resort where and when you want it.  But reality is that you're  lucky to get 1 out of 10 of your requests.  So when we got a week at South Lake Tahoe, we decided to try to make it into a family reunion. Since we have 6 kids, their spouses, and 14 grandchildren, we needed to accommodate 28 people.  Our timeshare accommodates at most 8 but only 6 comfortably.

Through Vacation Rentals by Owner we were able to find  a facility called Blue Haven which complimented the time share well - a recently built 3 story 8 bedroom 5 bathroom mansion.  The owner was willing to negotiate because they want to  debug this rental.  Pictures just don't do the facility justice but maybe you can get some idea of how much we were "roughing it".

So on Saturday all six of our kids and their families converged on South Lake Tahoe.  Actually, two of them had started a day or two earlier to either make the trip more tolerable or get in some sightseeing along the way.

Even though the house is a mansion it still has limited space so some thought had to be put into assigning the bedrooms to maximize the social integration among cousins and minimize bullying and homesickness.

By the time everyone had arrived and the rooms had been assigned and we had had our first meal, there was no time for anything other than sitting around talking and working on a puzzle and just renewing acquaintances.