Reno and the Nudists

I just spent 3 days in Reno visiting my sister and her family. We had a lot of fun from skate parks to shopping to nudist colonies to dinosaurs and panning for gold. Wondering how we fit all of that in in just 3 days? Let's just say little boys have a lot of energy.

My round up of the weekend is going to be completely out of order. I'm sure you'll get over it.

On Saturday Natalie declared she wanted to go to the hot springs and go swimming. She looked up a few places online. One was a state park about 3 hours north of Reno and cost $5/person, the other was a private resort about 1 hour away. We compared admission versus gas money, and opted to go with the private resort (which cost $15/person). We loaded up the car with 4 little boys (her 3 boys, plus their cousin), and Steve, Nats, and me, and headed off for middle of nowhere California.

It was an overcast, chilly but warm day. The resort was in a heavily wooded mountainous area- good for hot springs. When we arrived the first thing I noticed was the crazy number of volkswagons in the parking lot. Next I noticed the pretty flowers. Here's one of them.



The resort was a large plantation style home in the woods. After an hour in the car the four little boys needed to be herded straight to the bathroom. That's where I noticed the communal kitchen, and women not wearing bras. Lots of true hippies. We paid for our 3 hour pass and hiked up the trail to the "kid friendly" pool.

Now, at this point we did note that the signs said "swimsuit optional." But we figured if it was kid friendly the swimsuits would be more required than optional, right?

Heh heh. Not so much.

Here's the boys posing in front of the sign to the trail head.


And here's the building in front of the pool.




Where I walked up, looked in the window, looked at the hot tub inside, and saw lots of naked people.

Lots of them.

We walked AROUND the building, not through it, and looked at the pool. There were 2 kids (fully clothed- seriously- not just in bathing suits, but shirts too) in the pool, and several adults. And... well, it was unclear how many articles of clothing the adults were wearing.

But one thing was clear. Our brood of little boys was not going to be welcome in this special sanctuary.



Another thing became abundantly clear. Out little boys were not very happy that we had just dragged them an hour into the woods to NOT get into the pool. And needless to say, no one felt like explaining the naked problem to them.

But, hey, look, there's a random bathtub sitting in the woods filled with hot springs water. It's a little hard to tell from this picture, but it is full of water.


Let's throw the little boys in there and call it swimming.


Tell and Steve took off for a little hike in the woods. Their hike lead them to another hot spring, where swimsuits were not required OR optional. Tell has since declared that he never wants to see another naked lady. Ever.

In the meantime, the 3 little guys were finding the bathtub in the woods an interesting anomaly.


I think the best quote of the day came from Grady. "Natalie, is this what we got excited for?" Um, not really.

My attempt at an action shot. If you look, you can sort of see that Porter has just landed another "CANNONBALL!" into the tub. All 3 of them tried this repeatedly before determining it just wasn't that much fun after all.


Natalie's attempting to get her money's worth out of this adventure.


And this is me showing off the new swimsuit, sandals, and cover up I had bought just for this trip. On the bright side, it's still nice and new, and has never been wet. I have no idea why Blogger is making the picture sideways again. If you look beyond my sideways pastiness, you can see the beautiful mountain view beyond. It really was a lovely place.



After the boys had pretty much emptied the tub of water and cleaned it thoroughly, we headed back home.


Steve is happy because we got our money back.


Stay tuned tomorrow for more pictures from our other adventures.