Tag: truckee

a day up in the snow

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Truckee - River St Inn 021024

A couple of weekends ago we went up to Truckee, in the snowy Sierra Nevada mountains a couple of hours’ drive from Davis. We don’t get snow down here in the valley, but with all the weather at this time of year there was a good dumping up the in the Sierras, and we wanted a change of scenery. It’s colder, but it’s beautiful up there. We headed to the Jax by the Tracks Diner, which I drew when we were last up here at the end of 2020, when you couldn’t go inside because we were still in that Covid era. We went inside this time for lunch, and had delicious milkshakes. My ‘sexy chicken sandwich’ was nice, but I wish I’d got something else. I didn’t sketch inside, but we had a nice view from our table through a window of the lovely old building across the street, the River Street Inn, so I started a sketch of that. I knew I wouldn’t finish it, what with trying to get through my ‘sexy chicken sandwich’ (honestly I kept hearing Ruud Gullit’s voice in my head talking about the ‘sexy football’ his Newcastle team would play, only for it to be not very good and he dropped Alan Shearer) (I think it could have done with a bit more sauce, the fried chicken was a bit dry) (in the sandwich, not the Newcastle team) (but that too). My wife and sun’s lunches were delicious though, and I couldn’t get enough of that milkshake, that was worth the trip. I drew as much of the building as I could, but decided not to finish off once we got outside, so I did the rest from the photo I took from our table. I liked how tall the hydrant was, I think the snow can get suddenly really deep up there. The very first time I ever went there, back in the start of 2006, I was gobsmacked at the depth of the snow. I took a picture of a snowdrift outside a house, and it was only when I saw a long thin aerial poking out that I realised there was a car buried underneath. I was told it’s the snowiest part of the contiguous United States, just a couple of hours up the road from our snowless town.

We went and explored the main street of Truckee, all the little shops, trying not to slip up on any bits of ice, and I drew a slightly shorter fire hydrant with the snow around it. Afterwards we drove over to the Donner State Park, to walk around in the snow for a bit, and along the lake. the snow was quite deep up there, and we had our snow boots, but it wasn’t too cold. We weren’t up there too long, I did no snow-sketching, and it was a long drive back downhill to Davis, but at least we saw some Sierra snow in 2024.

Truckee hydrant 021024

snow day in truckee

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Jax Truckee Diner Dec30 2020

Last week, after not leaving the house for what felt like a lifetime, and taking a few days off work to eat and look at a screen, we got out of the house and drove up to the snow. It doesn’t snow in Davis, down here in the Sacramento Valley, but a couple of hours to the east of us is one of the snowiest parts of the contiguous US, in the Sierra Nevada mountains. The first time I ever went there I had never imagined snow like it, whole cars and the lower levels of houses swallowed up entirely, icicles like something from Hoth, and so cold my eyeballs were freezing over. It wasn’t like that this time, I don’t know they get quite that much snow up there any more, but there was still a good amount of snow, and lots of ice, though it wasn’t very cold. We went up to Truckee, walked around the town for a bit, got a pastry, ate our pre-packed sandwiches in the car. I really like Truckee and it’s been more than a decade since we stopped by there. I liked the look of this diner, Jax Truckee Diner, which of course wasn’t seating people inside right now but was allowing people to get take-out. Definitely somewhere I want to go to properly once all this Covid is behind us. I posted this on Instagram and my cousin said she had actually eaten there last year. I didn’t have time to draw it on site but I really wanted to draw it, so I took a photo and drew from that when I got home.

We had a nice time walking about in the snow. We went to a country park we’d never been to before close to Donner Lake (named after the Donner Party, the tragic historical incident which thankfully was given a name that many jokes can be made out of). It was like walking in a winter wonderland. When I say that, I don’t mean it was full of little stalls selling mulled wine and mass-produced hand-carved ornaments and expensive scarves, with Bing Crosby piping out of the speakers. Nor do I mean it was like walking in Woolie’s Winter Wonderland, which if you ever shopped at Woolworths in December you will know what I mean, back before Woolworths was finally laid to rest in 2008. I mean it was full of trees and snow, a perfect place to take photos. It was just nice being somewhere that looked different to Davis for a change. I don’t think I could live full time in a place which snowed regularly, but I don’t care, there is something magical about the world being blanketed in this white cold stuff. When it would snow overnight in London as a kid, which was way less often than you might think, looking out of the window and seeing the rooftops, the ground, the tops of cars, the branches of trees all gleaming white is still something I get excited about.

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In the car, we listened to the Adam Buxton podcast, his interview with Paul McCartney. That was a good interview. At one point Paul talked about when he met with John Lennon in New York in the mid 70s and they discovered they were both really into baking bread. I imagined what if they had decided to get together again and form a baking partnership together. I imagined they had a bakery in the West Village called “Love Me Dough”. (They would probably have had to invite George and Ringo in if they wanted to call it “Il Fab Fornaio”). They would sell products with names like “Got To Get You Into My Loaf”, “All You Knead is Love”, “Baguette Back”, “Bake in the USSR”, “I’ll Be Bap”, “A Croissant The Universe”, “Here Comes the Bun”, “While My Guitar Gently Wheats”, “Ticket To Rye”, “I Should Have Known Butter”, “Please Mr Toastman”, “Being Fro the Benefit of Mister Cake”, “All My Muffin”, “Garlic Twist’n’Shout”, “You’ve Got To Hide Your Loaf Away” and “Yeasterday”, to name but a few, I will think of more over the next rest of my lifetime. Flour Power. Rock’n’ Roll. Actually I’m already done with this idea. That was a loooooong journey home.