Family Vacation Day 1: Lake Tahoe

The Lamon Mack family is not known for their planning skills. But although it was out of character for us, many months ago we penciled in a trip to Yosemite for the second week of September. We even went as far as making a hotel and campground reservation ahead of time! Of course that is as far as we went with the whole planning thing, and the rest of the trips intinerary was sort of up in the air. We decided to make it a quick trip and drive most of the first day and stay in Lake Tahoe. We reserved to cheapest place we could find on the internet. We arrived in Lake Tahoe at about midnight. That was much later than expected. It was a long day of driving, but we were armed with fruit snacks, crackers, pistachios, bagels and cream cheese, and lots of movies. The kids did just fine. That is of course until we arrived in Lake Tahoe. The kids had all been sleeping for a few hours, and suddenly Hayden woke up and was not in the happiest of moods to say the least. He started crying uncontrollably. We were trying to figure out what was wrong, and how we could make him feel better; but he wasn't making a lick of sense at all. We would tell him, "Hayden, don't worry we are almost to the hotel." Then he would respond by wailing, "Noooooo!!! I don't want to sleep in the hotel!"
"Do you want to sleep in the car?"
"Noooooo!"
"Hayden, you aren't making any sense! What is wrong? Why don't you want to sleep in the hotel?"
Crying he said, "It's just . . . I don't know what it looks like!"
And that was it. For the next 45 minutes, or however long it took us to get inside the hotel, Hayden continued crying because he didn't know what it looked like inside.
When we got to the hotel, I was a little worried. It didn't look like the Ritz. We reserved the cheapest room available, so I wasn't expecting anything too grand . . . but after getting there I was a little worried about what we would find.
Lamon went to check in while me and Marybeth listened to Hayden cry about not knowing what the hotel looked like inside, and a part of me was feeling the same way at that point. Lamon finally came out with a key, and was trying to get into our room (which didn't have a non-smoking sign on the door) and after trying for a few minutes the door wouldn't open. He finally went back to the office to have them rekey it, and he came back and tried again. But still there was no luck. He couldn't get the door open. He went back to the office again. At this point I was thinking to myself, "This is really going to be a dive, and we will never hear the end of it from Hayden! But then Lamon came back with a huge smile on his face, and walked to a different room entirely. We were thinking maybe he was trying the wrong room the whole time, but then Lamon came back and told us that the front desk guy asked him, "How would you like a free upgrade? We have this $450 dollar Suite that never gets used because no one can afford it. Would you guys like it?" We were pretty stoked! So here are some pictures of our 79 dollar room, I mean suite, at Lake Tahoe! There was a gas fireplace in the master bedroom, flat screen tv's in every room, a full kitchen and dining area, another bedroom with a nice little couch, and a very nice bathroom with a huge sweet shower.