With three feet of fresh snow in the last week of March and more in the first week of April, it’s not too late to do one more (or even a first of the season) family ski trip. If you live in the San Francisco Bay Area, there are lots of options including some hidden gems that you can reach faster than Lake Tahoe and without the pain, misery and unpredictability of driving on Interstate 80.
The chart below shows the costs and distance to the best family ski options. Tahoe Donner is the most affordable and Dodge Ridge is the closest from mid-peninsula.
San Francisco Bay Area Family Ski Options
Saving Some Money
Note the rental costs listed above are for renting on site, but you’d often do better to rent nearer to home like Helms of Sun Valley in San Mateo. Note also that discount lift tickets for each ski destination can be found somewhere, often at a local rental shop, or sometimes at a super market along the drive to the hill. See SlidingOnTheCheap as a good starting point or just Google “discount lift tickets at _(ski hill of choice)_”. If both parents don’t want to ski all day or at the same time the parent interchangeable tickets are a good option, and more convenient than trying to share the one jacket with a lift ticket stuck to it. Read More »
Last Sunday, the girl and I took in the 6th annual Clayton Club Chili Cook-off in Clayton, California.
Acting as my photographer, the girl busied herself snapping photos for this story as I ambled about “the club,” chatting up some of the prettier contestants, and hungrily eying the 17 crock pots of bubbling chili.
Welcome to our newest blog series: Things are Looking Up!
I think that just about everyone is eagerly looking forward to what 2010 will bring. At UpTake we are looking up! Literally! Into the sky, up the sides of buildings, at the ceiling…
Over the next two weeks we will share a daily image from the UpTake perspective. Today, enjoy one of our favorite local icons (local for our headquarters that is). We love living in the Bay Area and in honor of it, behold the Golden Gate Bridge. Come visit and LOOK UP!
If you are interested in trying out this experiment, go for it! It’s simple. Here are the 2-step instructions:
1. Look UP
2. TAKE a photo
…and maybe a 3rd step: get a nice deep neck stretch, breathe it all in and smile.
It’s a fantastic exercise wherever you are, it’s free and who knows what you will see. The possibilities are endless, and well, it’s fun. You may see a cloud in the shape of an octopus, a flock of birds, perhaps the Sears Tower (or is it Willis Tower now?), The Washington Monument, an apple blossom on a tree, snowflakes, El Capitan!
If you would like to share one of your “UpTakes”, please submit your photo by using the editor contact link in the sidebar.
For me, travel is about experiences. I love going places I’ve never been and doing things I’ve never done and meeting people I wouldn’t normally meet. I once spent a highly amusing morning on a step in San Francisco’s Union Square communing with three friendly pigeons and a very odd man who insisted that I should be a model. This is not something that happens to me during the course of a normal day. Nor does it occur when I’m hiding my pale body under an umbrella on long weekend at the beach. And it certainly wouldn’t have happened if I’d opted for an overpriced breakfast in my hotel’s dining room. It happened because I took my Starbucks venti regular and my chocolate croissant and ventured out to see what I could see.
