Being expat Iowans like we are, we found ourselves about 12 hours too far away to go home for Thanksgiving. This left us with a Very Important Decision:
1. Have Thanksgiving by ourselves and try not to burn the turkey
2. Have Thanksgiving somewheres else
We have cool friends, so we got an invitation to have Thanksgiving somewheres else. (Hooray!) We weren’t sure they had entirely realized what they’d gotten themselves into when they invited us because I still don’t know much of anything about football, (“Woah, that guy just whacked that thing out of the air at the end of the field, was that good?”) or about computers. (“Joey, come put stuff on the flash drive for me. I still don’t know how…”)
Almost everyone knows that two important things on Thanksgiving are watching football and going through the ads to decide whether or not it’s worth it to go shopping on Friday. I try to understand football, I really do. But there are just some things in life that I can’t seem to comprehend. And I need Joey to feel like he’s The Man, so I let him do all the computer stuff.
Anyway, Danny and Laura invited us to Laura’s family’s house to share the holiday. We had a fantastic time.
Before lunch we watched football. Correction: Joey watched football and I tried to watch football. None of the refs got ran over by any football players in the 10 minutes I managed to watch, so I got bored of it very quickly and looked through the ads. Cabelas wasn’t having any good deals on anything unless you wanted guns (ick) or a fake deer to practice shooting your gun (also ick).
This is Danny and Laura. We are very thankful that they shared their family with us for the day! I managed to be 95% homesick free, which is a pretty good percentage considering all the amazing funness that was being had in Iowa without us.
After lunch we went on a very long walk. It was nice and cold outside which was perfect for Thanksgiving. (Rumor has it that snowflakes were seen in Dallas, but we were in Plano and didn’t see any.) We all bundled up as much as possible and headed out. Fortunately, Joey had our camera in tow.
We hadn’t walked four blocks when Joey saw a large cluster of bushes.
“Danny, run behind that bunch of bushes and I’ll take your picture,” he said.
Danny ran over to the bushes and posed like a gopher. (At least we think it looks like a gopher, who knows, maybe he was going for chipmunk.)
(The two nice-looking people in the foreground are Laura’s parents. And that’s Danny behind the bush.)
Someone happened to notice this trailer parked right across the street from the bushes that Danny had been hiding behind. I’m not sure you can read it, it’s pretty small, but there are about four cameras on top of the trailer pointed right at the bushes. The sides of the trailer say “WE ARE WATCHING YOU!” They’re serious about it, too.
We half expected FBI agents to come busting out and take us all down.
Along trail was a creek and, as we got closer to the bridge, everyone ran to grab sticks we could play Poohsticks. I held mine and Joey’s since he was taking pictures.
And, for a brief moment, I thought I’d actually won! But then it was pointed out to me that Laura’s brother Matt had won and his stick looked an awful lot like mine.
(I will point out that Joey’s stick, a smallish, lightweight reed-type thing, lost the worst of every other stick. So at least I beat him.)
We walked a little bit farther and, around a bend, we came upon this sign.
“Ha!” Joey crowed, “Go stand under that sign! I think you’ll fit.”
I fit. Barely.
The pond/lake was just down the path from the horsey sign, and the sidewalk and bank of the pond was covered in geese. It was pretty amazing. So Danny and Megan chased them and made them all fly away which, had I different shoes on, I’d have totally done too.
Our first Texas Thanksgiving, I’d say it was a pretty great day. Thanks to Danny and Laura and the Reeders for hosting us, we had a fantastic time.
