Outdoors with Don Q: Some personal memories from the year 2011

As I look forward to the year of 2012 with high expectations, hopes and dreams, this is a good time to reflect back on some selected personal memories from the rapidly ending year of 2011. Here are my top memories:

Canning Bing Cherries in brandy
This summer, for the very first time, Elaine and I canned Bing Cherries marinated in brandy with many jars filled with very tasty results. It is not a complicated process: You buy a case or more of pint-sized canning jars with lids, lots of Bing Cherries and your favorite brandy.
Fill each jar with cherries, pour in brandy until it is over the top of the cherries, put a lid on each jar and then store the jars for future use.
Over time, the cherries will slowly become brandied and make a great welcome addition to a Manhattan cocktail.
We have several cases of brandied cherries at our home and at our cabin, which should make for delightful cocktail hours during the winter months.

Elaine out fishing me, one more time, at Lake Tahoe
In 2009, Elaine and I fished with our good friend, Gene St. Denis, of Blue Ribbon Charters of South Lake Tahoe. She caught a trophy-sized 20-pound, 9-ounce Mackinaw (Lake) Trout, while my largest was only 8 pounds.
In 2010, she did it to me again while we fished with Gino. She caught a 10-pound Mack, while my largest was 5 pounds. This year while fishing once again with Gino, the good news is that her best was only 8.5 pounds, but the bad news is that my best was just 8.0 pounds. That’s three straight years that she has beaten me at my favorite sport! And, to add insult to injury, she has also won the Mackinaw Trout category in the Ormsby Sportsmen’s Association fishing contest three years in a row.

Elaine’s Mom’s trip to rural Nevada in May
Her Mom, Mary Bottoms, could not accompany us on our trip overseas in September and October, so we did the next best thing as a substitute: The three of us spent a week touring all kinds of places in rural Nevada.
She had never been to many of the locations where we took her, so it was an opportunity for her to experience the following: Visiting Squaw Creek Reservoir in Northern Washoe County and staying overnight at Bruno’s Country Club in Gerlach. Seeing the sand dunes, east of Fallon. Staying overnight at the Sundowner Lodge in Eureka. Driving to Great Basin National Park and taking the tour of Lehman Caves. Returning to Ely and staying overnight at the Bristlecone Motel. Watching me catch a Northern Pike at Comins Lake. Driving to Tonopah and staying at the Jim Butler Motel. Driving to Hawthorne, touring its back streets and returning home via Yerington. If that isn’t a taste of rural Nevada, I don’t know what is!

Lunches at Bordertown, Nevada
Almost without fail, whenever we drive from Carson City to our family cabin, between Portola and Lake Davis, California, we stop to have lunch at the restaurant at Bordertown on the Nevada-California state line.
Over the years, we have become such frequent regulars there that all the hostesses, the waitresses and the bus boys know us by sight and/or name.
It is always an enjoyable eating stop, plus as a bonus, the food is superb.
My favorite order is: A bacon cheeseburger with no onions, French fries and either coffee or iced tea, depending on the time of the year. Great food and great service always equal a great time at Bordertown.

Six week vacation trip to Italy, Sicily and Switzerland
A fun-filled trip with Bob and Lorraine (my first cousin) Scholes of Dayton. The four of us traveled the length and width of Italy, spent a week in Sicily and even wandered into Switzerland, while on our way to Cortina, Italy.
Our many memories during those six weeks include: The huge crowds of people in the big cities. The insane traffic in those big cities. The mind-boggling, very ancient history. The countless churches, temples, ruins, statues and artwork. The gorgeous countryside in Northern Italy with olive tree orchards, endless vineyards and huge corn fields. The awesome beauty of the Dolomite Mountains and the Swiss Alps.

The spectacular sunrise at Cortina, Italy
On our late summer-early fall vacation trip, we spent one night in Northern Italy in Cortina, which was the site of the 1956 Winter Olympics. The next morning, after the first snowfall of the season, we took a large number of photos of the bright sunlight on the snow covered Dolomite Mountains in the background with the lighted steeple of the Catholic Church in the dark foreground. That scene was absolutely spectacular!
One of Elaine’s photos was breathtaking and we used it for our 2011 Christmas Cards and also for the front cover of our 2012 calendars.

Whole bunch of digital photographs
On our six week vacation trip Elaine and I took a total of almost 5,000 photos with our two digital cameras.
At the same time, Lorraine took 2,200 with her camera.
If you’re good at math, that’s a total of 7,200 photos between the three of us.
I’m slowly but surely working through our 5.000 photos (deleting duplicates and bad shots, cropping, indexing, cataloging, etc. The good news is that we really got some outstanding photos.
The bad news is that I’ll probably be busy all winter and well into next spring before I’m done with all of our photos.

Finally:
I hope that you have as many pleasant memories of the year 2011 as I have. It was a great year and I hope that 2012 will be even better.

Bet Your Favorite Pigeon
Bet your favorite pigeon that he can’t tell you which of the above memories was the very best of the year.
If he grins and says, “Don will tell you that his best memory for 2011 was their six-week vacation trip to Italy,” he is probably one of my relatives, a close friend or a next-door neighbor, who have seen some of the photos.

— Carson City resident and outdoorsman Don Quilici is the Outdoor editor for Carson Now and South Tahoe Now. He can be reached at donquilici@hotmail.com.