I like that no one really knows about Tahoe. You don’t hear about it like you do the Grand Canyon or the Everglades or Mt. Rushmore. You probably know the name, but the place? It’s a spectacular little secret tucked far enough away from Reno and Sacramento to really keep out the riff raff. I like being some of the only riff raff in town.

When the repairs had been explained, the credit card details exchanged, and the bus fired up beautifully purring I asked the mechanic his name.

“Jesus,” he said. I smiled, as this bus has given me so much over the short time I’ve lived with her, wandering random friends, a warm place to live, steady transportation around Colorado and now so far beyond. It only made sense that Jesus would fix my bus.

We climbed fast and hard out of Carson City, never really looking back and a guy passed us beeping his horn and waving his hands. A fellow Pennsylvanian, representing the Steeler Nation all over the back of his little Subaru. The mountains went up and up and soon we were overlooking the forest cliffsides that we would then disappear into the canopies of, but nothing beats the feeling of first seeing the great big blue Lake Tahoe peeking through those conifers.

To say that Lake Tahoe is crystal clear would be a horrible understatement. You can see the shimmering reflection of the sun, for certain, but the depths of which you can look down through the water and see the giant tan boulders, the smaller gray stones, fish swimming, sands replacing other sands; this lake is clearer than transparent, it’s almost telescopic in it’s visuals.

My dear friend Matthew has lived as a snowboarder on the lake’s various shores for nearly a decade now and he showed us back into the mountain forests to a hidden lake where the snow was still clinging from a dumping the previous week, where eagle’s nests sat at the top of beautywoods and a broken raft, unsunk but not quite floating, hovered in the water. We talked of camping here for a summer, how easy it would be to live off the land or even just the beauty of the land and I thought, for the first time, about moving here for a minute.

But that was the previous night and in the aftermath dear Champ, that old VW bus cruiser so dedicated to making this trip, began the long stretch to Lake Tahoe, through Ely – an old west casino town, mining town and frequent cowboy movie set – through Austin – a half-horse town at the bottom of a corkscrew winder of a stretch of the highway – through Carson City – where the poor good bus died, after choosing not to do so in a dozen quaint small towns that would have been a joy to explore while waiting for her to get reworked – and on to Lake Tahoe.

The Carson City setback proved less painful than perhaps it could have been. Though stuck in what might be Nevada’s most horrible city, a small capital wrapped in the expansion of modern suburbia mixed with strip mall America, the sun poured a perfect purple set and a bike trail lead from the garage where she so conveniently died to the Gold Dust Casino which would serve as home for the night. Lake Tahoe taunted just over the mountain skyline, promising the glory of that crystal blue lake in the morning.