By Michelle Robertson, San Francisco Chronicle
 
“Every day I wake up here is a vacation,” says 46-year-old Ricardo Garcia. He and his wife moved to Truckee in 2005, after years of hopping around San Francisco’s neighborhoods in an effort to make the city feel like “home.” The endeavor was complicated by an expensive real estate market.

Unable to find the house they wanted in the Bay Area, they looked east, to Tahoe.

“Everything we enjoyed doing was here,” he said – hiking, boating, skiing, climbing and other -ings.

Garcia is one of an unquantifiable number of Bay Area ex-pats who’ve turned the vacation destination of Lake Tahoe into a permanent home. The place can suck you in quick.

Read the whole story