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Friday Slide Show: Vacation
19 July 2024
When we were kids, we actually "went on vacation" for two weeks every August. Dad would pile us into the car with Mom in the front and we'd suffer through the three-hour drive through the baked Great Central Valley into the foothills of the Sierras and up to 6,000 feet where Lake Tahoe beckoned brightly in the thin air.
We'd stay at Agate Bay Lodge run by Stan and Isabel. Stan had once had as gas station in Albany, Calif., and Dad, as a kid himself, had worked there for Stan. Every afternoon Dad would go down to the office at happy hour and visit with Stan.
Stan cleaned the pool every morning and Isabel freshened up the cottages for each new guest. It was hard work and they weren't young even then.
We'd squeeze around the table in the little kitchen of the cottage every morning to wolf down whatever Mom had made on what looked like a toy stove. The place smelled of knotty pine even with bacon frying.
Dad had transferred his vacation movies to DVD years ago but we'd never seen these images.
We'd busy ourselves with comic books until the magic hour of 10 o'clock when the pool opened in deference to the older guests who wanted to sleep in. Then we'd jump in and not come out until lunch time.
Afternoons were adventures. Horseback riding, miniature golf, a boat ride, trout fishing. Or at the beach, catching crawfish and chasing the flecks of fool's gold sparkling in the lake's sandy bottom.
Tahoe is cold. Diving in was the only way to do it. We'd walk down to the end of the wooden pier, hold our breath and dive into water formed from melted snow. Our teeth would chatter and our muscles would stiffen up. We'd keep our shoulders under to stay as warm as possible and we kept moving.
Dad had transferred his vacation movies to DVD years ago but we'd never seen these images. When we went through the boxes of old negatives that had no prints, we found them. And they transported us back to a time when we actually took vacations.
There are all four of us kids in this set of Kodak Safety color film* images so it must have been around 1962 or so, judging by the size of the smallest. The difference in our ages was significant: 10, 8, 6, 2.
Even in these stills, we can detect our personalities and the affection we had for each other, well aware we were all part of the same family.
We scanned these with VueScan on a CanoScan 9000F, cropped them in Lightroom where they were resized and spotted them in Photoshop. We used the Kodacolor Gold II 200 color negative profile in VueScan and we didn't do any local color correction (there had been a light leak) but we didn't expect to make these look contemporary.
They were, after all, from long ago. Sadly so. But what a joy to see again what we had only pictured in our mind.
