LIVELY TIMES BESIDE THE LAKE: When there's a large body of water that's considered to be one of the planet's most glorious spots -- let's just cut straight to the absolutely true, watertight statements here -- it can be challenging to turn your gaze from the water for any length of time. Oh, perhaps if you're a skier, and there are snowy slopes nearby, but all that shimmery blue expanse? Yep, it's captivating. But the rather wonderful thing about Lake Tahoe -- we're talking about Lake Tahoe here, lest you were sitting in suspense -- is that its shores tend to be laden with lovely and mind-expanding and thought-challenging and heart-gladdening happenings. And if you arrive in September? Well, just multiply those happenings by two or three. That happens to be TahoeART Month around North Tahoe, which is the time of year a whole spring of cultural to-dos burble up and take flight (or, less poetically and more accurately, appear before your eyes in galleries and on paths near the lake). Wait strike that: It is plenty poetic, TahoeART Month, fanciful flight or not, and it is set to swan lakeside from Sept. 1 through 30. The only difficult part for you? Nope, it isn't tearing your attention away from the crystalline surface of the water. It's choosing what weekend to arrive and what to do.
ON THE SCHEDULE: Everything glitters, as one wants from an out-sized art month, but look to the plein air painting event near the start. Some thirty artists will put brush to canvas in an outdoor setting and then, voila, the paintings shall go on display. Call it very, very fresh art. That's on from Sept. 2 through 7. An Autumn Food & Wine Festival falls over that weekend -- that's the 6th and 7th -- and the Trails & Vistas guided art hikes trek on that Saturday and Sunday as well. Dance, tunes, and more high-elevation goodies of the most elevating sort await. Going to the lake for some early fall action? Love on some quality art, too.
