Thanksgiving and Beyond

My parents lost their internet, tv, and phone early on Thanksgiving morning, so no updates! Greg and I finally resorted to going Panera-hopping for free wifi on Friday, because I had a bunch of stuff to do for school, and Greg is still working on some thesis revisions. I joked that we were celebrating like the Pilgrims did. :)

But Thanksgiving was good: we had my parents, Greg, me, Dan, Victoria, my aunt Sherry, and my cousin Omar. Lots and lots of food - I'm still trying to remember all of what we had.

We certainly missed Dusty and Lefty while we were gone (thanks again, Alan and Kim,!) but we had the antics of my parents cat Nibbler to keep us entertained. He took a liking to our bed, and made sure he had a good spot in it each night. Greg got this photo of him hiding in a shopping bag. On Wednesday, my mom roasted two turkey breasts (to make sure we had turkey leftovers!), and we think Nibbler was hiding in the bad, hoping we'd forget he was there and walk away, leaving the turkey unguarded. He almost outsmarted us.

We left my parents on Saturday morning, and drove out to Pennsylvania, to meet my friend Beth, who I met online through Coordinates Collections, a scrapbooking site. We've gotten to know each other over the last year or so, and the weirdest thing was that this was the first time we actually met in person -- it feels like we've known each other so much longer! It was so great to finally meet her, and to get to see the scrapbook store that she works at. I didn't get out of there lightly!

Off to Greg's aunt and uncle's house, basically in the same town where Beth lives, near Hershey, PA. We caught up with them for a bit, and had some turkey leftovers for dinner. Then, they treated us by taking us to Hershey Park! We went through Chocolate World, for the free chocolate. Then had hot chocolate. And cookies. We walked it off by going to the park, which was lit up for the holidays. It felt good to be outside in the cold! They had some rides running (we went on the carousel, which actually went a lot faster than Greg or I remembered -- we're so old!), and tons of lights! Here are some pictures -- it's hard to see us in some of them, because I'm so anti-flash. I *always* blink when the flash goes off (which irritates my father, a photographer, to no end).





We were up early on Sunday morning to make the drive back home. I knew the drive was going to be rough, even with the three hour head start. The highways we take are only 2 lanes in either direction for long stretches, and on a day like the Sunday after Thanksgiving, you can easily get trapped in a lane and not be able to get out for miles. It's just grueling. We also hit some rain, and at one point, saw two accidents within a mile of each other. The worst was when we got to about within an hour of home and hit traffic that was stopping for no reason. I don't know if we were stopping for hills, or for exits, but it was just awful. We are glad to have made it back safe and sound. Dusty and Lefty were happy to see us, too. They kept walking around, sniffing and meowing. That's a cat's way of saying "welcome home."