Thanksgiving Break

A couple months ago my mother-in-law proposed an unconventional type of Thanksgiving vacation: why not invite my family to visit? If sitcoms are any gauge for how in-laws get along, this should have been a one-way ticket to disaster. Fortunately for all of us, network television is not an accurate assessment of most Americans. It was a great Thanksgiving, and we had a lot of fun.

My family drove down from Ohio on Wednesday. According to AAA, more than 37 million people were traveling somewhere for Thanksgiving on Wednesday, which made their trip about an hour and a half longer than usual. While we were waiting for them to get here, we tried our hand at making pumpkin pies. They took forever to bake because of our oven, but they came out pretty well in the end. After my family got here, we went to get a bite to eat at Jason's Deli, one of our favorite places around town. My youngest brother wasn't too excited about going to a deli. He liked the idea of going to an all-you-can-eat buffet or a pizza joint a lot better than a deli. But by the time we finished our meal, he was converted. It might have been the free ice cream you get with each meal.

We stayed up pretty late playing video games and talking, and then we went to bed. The apartment was pretty full with five extra people living here, but it wasn't too bad. The next morning I made cinnamon sticky buns for breakfast. My sibs didn't want to get up, but I think the cinnamon buns helped. We had to make one last-minute trip to the supermarket for cranberry sauce, and then we packed up our stuff and traveled down to Huntsville. We stopped at the Piggly Wiggly in Ardmore, Tennessee so my sibs could get pictures of the store. They think it's the funniest Southern thing they've ever seen, and I'm inclined to agree.



As soon as we got to Becca's parents' house, my sibs and her sibs immediately started playing video games again. I didn't really feel like stopping them because they were getting along so well. We brought stuff to make mashed potatoes and candied yams, so we started cooking the yams and peeling the potatoes. We also started some wild air-hockey games. To my surprise, the most competitive players were our fathers. They even played a multi-puck game for a while, which made a huge racket. After it got a little crazy in the house, I started a game of cross-country bocce out in the yard with my dad, Becca's dad, and my sibs, Anna and John. We went all around the house, and at the end of the game we really couldn't remember who had the most points. But it was really fun, and the unseasonably warm weather made it a great day to play outside.



We finally got to the dinner part, after John had been complaining for an hour that he was hungry. It was a good dinner, with everything you could want. The turkey was turned out well, and the rest of the meal followed suit. The rest of they day we kept playing games and we watched a movie later in the evening. We also planned out our moves the next morning for Black Friday. I went out with my mother in law last year on Black Friday to get a GameCube, and this year we planned to hit the stores for various goodies. But there wasn't anything really big that we wanted, so we didn't leave until 8 am. We shopped until noon and got almost everything we needed, and then we came back for lunch. There were so many leftovers, it was like another Thanksgiving meal. My family came over from the hotel and we all got ready to go geocaching.



We hiked up the little mountain behind their neighborhood. It was pretty steep in some places, and there really wasn't much of a trail. It wasn't too long, though, and we were soon on top of the ridge looking down on Huntsville. We walked along the trail at the top of the ridge and searched for three different geocaches. We didn't find the first one because we didn't realize it was a microcache until after we got back. We did find a sweet cave, though. We had more luck at the next two caches. We left a snail shell in one of them and a Band-Aid in another. Coming down from the ridge was a lot easier than going up, and we were soon back home.



We went out to Chinese restaurant for dinner, since it was the only place we could get reservations for eleven on Thanksgiving weekend. Dinner was fun just because we could all talk together at the big table. We watched Charlie and the Chocolate Factory after dinner, which was a really weird movie. My dad thought it was funny, though.

We said good-bye to my family after the movie because they had to drive home Saturday. We spent most of Saturday watching movies (AMC had a Western marathon, and Spike TV had its traditional Bondathon) and shopping for some Christmas gifts. When we got home last night we were tired, but happy to have spent so much time with family. This was my last break until finals are over, so from here on out it's crunch time. I have to study and prepare for exams, and we both have to look for a new car and shop for family members for Christmas. So last week's break was just what the doctor ordered.