So the crew and I have just returned from our third official Weekend World Tour…
This, dear friends, was our itinerary:
One of the many, valuable lessons we learned on our excursion is that itineraries and Tahoe don’t go together. In fact, there are several things that Tahoe apparently doesn’t tolerate:
1. coloreds
2. safe driving
3. leaving Tahoe
4. fun
I’d fully intended to give a brief report on our weekend adventure that included bits about all the places that we visited. Yes, that was the plan… but the strange and awful events of the latter half of our outing bear telling in their entirety.
The first two dates can be summed up simply:
Delightfully acceptable.
San Jose is a cool place. It was my third rap-related visit there and things there never seem to get worse than slightly annoying or better than “we’re not broke.” It’s a good place to raise kids.
The Eureka show had a fork stuck in it by the time we left L.A. (sorry, folks), so we ended up spending an extra night in good old lukewarm San Jo…
The next morning, our trip tries to drown itself in lake water and Pabst Blue Ribbon.
The four-hour drive from the Bay to Tahoe went as well as a four-hour drive can go. The first thing I learned about Tahoe, however, is that it’s 5,000 feet in the air. It’s like a little slice of Scandinavia nestled in the middle of California and Nevada. And what happens in Scandinavia? It snows too much.
There were snow banks on either side of the highway that reached seven or eight feet in the air. Fortunately, the road was clear. Had it not been, we were well equipped with $70 snow chains that none of us knew how to install.
After about an hour and a half of chilly air, nervousness and awe, we reached the Tahoe Inn and with it our first nemesis…
The driveway of the Tahoe Inn.
In an act of civil disobedience to rival Thoreau, the good people (person) at the Tahoe Inn neglected to shovel their driveway, disallowing easy entrance to anyone unlucky enough to not be driving a Subaru Outback. Since none of us hunt crocodiles, we had one hell of a time getting unstuck from the half-melted snow in the driveway. It took three grown men pushing down on the hood while reversing to back the car out into the highway with little to no warning of on-coming traffic. We survive long enough to back out and try it again with more speed; we make it all the way up to the top of the driveway and get our silly asses stuck again. It would be another twenty minutes before we made it to the front desk.
We end up with all of fifteen minutes to get un-car-stinky and burn set CDs for the show. So while we’re tearing up the highway on the way to the venue at a brisk 45-and-a-half miles an hour, we hit a turn and spin out of control. The car does a one-eighty and lodges itself ass-first into a snow bank.
Damn.
We were all surprisingly calm for having nearly died. Had there been any vehicle headed in our direction during the spin… we would have tested the safety rating of the Volvo in the least desirable manner.
We hop out of the car… mind you, it’s about 17 degrees and I’m probably the only member of the group with a closet full of winter clothes (thank you, Lake Michigan). I’m on the phone with Triple A (wish I had Triple H’s number, he could have given us steroids) while the homies are trying to flag down help. Some ultra-helpful Tahoe lady (in a Subaru Outback) pulls over and nudges us out of the snow bank. I hang up mid-sentence with AAA, and we all agree that its time for the damned chains.
We unzip the bag; the chains look like a bundle of robot bones with a bread tie at either end. Applying them is comparable to putting a neck tie on a grizzly bear. We get them on with two caveats:
1. you cant go faster than 30 m.p.h.
2. it sounds like you’re driving a washing machine filled with nickels.
We pussyfoot down a two-lane highway to the venue and five miles in we hear a loud pop. Nothing seems to have changed so we continue driving. Three miles later the right-washing machine gets louder, then silent.
We lost a damned chain.
F-it, Tahoe hip-hop needs us, so we carry on… ’til we lose the other one. At this point my patience is fairly spent. 70 bucks down the crapper. This show better be good. We have high hopes for Club Zenbu(?).
As we approach the venue we realize quickly that the word “Zenbu” is Scandinavian for “Not cracking at all”.
I also realize at this point, that I’ve lost my cell phone somewhere… guess where?
In the snow.
$@&*#!
We arrive to an enthusiastic crowd of fifteen or twenty ski enthusiasts watching a snowboarding video on a wall opposite the stage. There was one guy who seemed to be there for a hip-hop show… he was visibly wasted and dancing extra-hard to everything over the P.A. Then, he does the most fantastically moronic thing that I’ve ever seen:
He walks onto the stage, walks toward the DJ booth, knocks the DJ’s beer over onto one of his CD players and walks off the stage… right into the club bouncer waiting to toss his ass out onto the yellow snow. Goodbye, lone hip-hop fan, we hardly knew ye…
Luckily we kick ass, so a good time was had by all; even the disaffected snow bunnies got involved when we freestyled at the end of our set. We killed the last of our complimentary Pabst Blue Ribbons, got our money and ran… literally. Two of the homies decide to challenge each other to a footrace on the ice. You know who wins a footrace on the ice? The spectators.
Needless to say, they both lose their balance, as one decides to start hopping on one foot, reducing the contact between him and the ice. While he’ll likely lose now since he can’t adjust his trajectory to the car, he keeps from busting his ass. The other homie? Not so lucky… he slides full-speed into the car. Had his human bones been less dense, he would have exploded on impact. He lay draped over the car for some time, having knocked the wind out of himself.
We drive back to the hotel at a blistering 24-and-a-third miles an hour. While laughing about the homie cracking his floating ribs, we receive a phone call from my phone number—somebody found my phone in the snow! We make arrangements for him to drop it off at the front desk of the place he’s staying (Tahoe Resort Property Management), for me to pick up after 8am.
Damn, might our Tahoe experience be turning around?
One of our caravan even managed to get lucky with a snow bunny back at Hotel Hell. Things were looking up… a bit. I’d link up with my cell phone the next morning and we’d be on our way to a lower, dryer Reno…
I awake, grab the phone book and guess what?
There’s no such place as Tahoe Resort Property Management.
Thanks, random ski-dude… thanks a lot.
After visiting the front desks of every place that had “Tahoe”, “Resort” and “Property” in the title and getting politely clowned by a few employees (“Nope, haven’t seen it, but if we find one we’ll call you… oh wait… [laughter]) I drove our sour arses outta there…
F-it, we’ll get to Reno early, chill in the hotel and work on some music.
Reno? Made it. Dry
Hotel? Nice, smells like ass but paid for.
Time? Plenty.
Show? Cancelled.
Yup. We get a call at 6pm informing that the show’s been cancelled due to 3-5 feet of white poop that’s about to be dropped on the city. If we stayed the night we might be stuck there for two (or three) days…
We checked out of the hotel—which wouldn’t discount me one warm dollar even though we’d been there a total of three hours—and we take off back to L.A…. through a blizzard. Men dressed in orange employed by the State of Nevada made us buy more snow chains before we could pass through. Another 70 damned dollars, only this time they actually fit right so they stayed on. And thankfully so, since we surely would have died driving through this blizzard; it took us seven hours to drive a hundred and fifty miles.
When we finally made it out we celebrated with cheap food and hot chocolate.
