South Lake Tahoe in March with small children

A quick summary of our trip:

-Discovered that March is an awesome time to go - no crowds and no traffic!

-After reading reviews, I took a chance on Lake Tahoe Vacation Resort by Diamond Resorts and loved it.  (We requested a ground floor to stay safe and avoid taking elevators.  I also wiped down a lot of high-touch areas in the hotel room after checking in.  

-Parking gets full by 5:00 - 5:30 pm but there is off-site parking across the street at Five Guys.  With people leaving for dinner we never had an issue finding  on-site parking 

-If you're a family of four with two kids under 6, I highly recommend the one-bedroom standard.  Originally I had booked the studio, but after being upgraded to the one-bedroom standard, we can't imagine staying in anything smaller

-We mainly grabbed food from Whole Foods and ate at our hotel room which has a huge dining table that easily seats 7 people.  There's also a full kitchen with utensils, dishes, bowls, cooking ware, dish soap, towels, garbage bags, and a dishwasher.  

-I made the rookie mistake of using last year's snow pants for the kids - they fit but but my daughter must have had a crazy growth spurt, the pants were too short and I felt guilty she cried half an hour into our time at Adventure Mountain (we made up for it by having her sled at a park without deep snow and she didn't want to leave).  In the past we've always gotten the kid's snowpants from Target.  

-Children's snow pants may be difficult to find; all the major stores were sold out.

- We love Adventure Mountain for sledding (if you can afford sleds, buy them, otherwise the lines to rent are looooong.  We got ours from Costco).  I highly recommend getting here right when it opens at 9:00 a.m. on weekends.  The crowds started showing up around 11:00 a.m. 

Lake Tahoe Vacation Resort by Diamond Resorts in the background.  There's a nice little duck pond in the back as well as adirondack chairs around a fire pit.  

I grabbed my family and took an impromptu trip to South Lake Tahoe.  Most people wouldn't think to come here in March, but in my opinion it's one of the best times to go - no crowds and no traffic!  The worse trip I can recall was in 2017, it was a 9-hour drive on a Friday afternoon and I was two months pregnant and had a whining 2-year old (granted we did make multiple pit stops).  We learned the hard way to never leave the Bay Area on a Friday afternoon, even on a non-holiday weekend!  We've lived and worked in or near the City for so long that we've forgotten how bad traffic could be.  

We stopped on the side of the road to take this breathtaking photo - you can see a small slice of that Lake Tahoe blue.

Adventure Mountain - Try to get here as soon as it opens which is 9:00 a.m. on weekends

I made the mistake of using snow pants that were 2 years too young for my daughter - I couldn't help it, they still fit!  But I wasn't expecting her to have such a growth spurt before our trip that the pants were nearly like capris.  Of course she had to step into snow that was 4 feet deep - she couldn't resist its invitation.  Forty-five minutes later, her socks were soaked and she refused to stay on the mountain any longer, but later on in the day she had a great time sleding at a park that didn't have deep snow.  It was a shock to learn that it was impossible to find snow pants in any of the stores - apparently, there was a manufacturing issue and the stores have been been sold out of children's snow pants for weeks.  

Overall, we had a great time and most importantly we stayed safe.  It was a nice change of scenery and it was so beautiful being in a winter wonderland at the end of March.