A Sunny Thanksgiving

I always have room for Party Potatoes!!
Originally uploaded by margejames.

For Thanksgiving this year Stegret and I headed out to Florida to visit his family. The whole trip was relaxing and a great break from the norm. We spent the first couple of days just hanging out with his mom and running some errands. Of course the best errand was the shopping for Thanksgiving Dinner – I love the grocery store. Since his mom hadn’t been planning on cooking this year we made a deal with her that we’d cook everything if she took care of the turkey, stuffing and gravy. I planned out a bunch of dishes and then in my normal cooking fashion proceeded to make enough food for double the amount of people we had at dinner. Here’s a list of what I made:

• Cranberry Marshmellow Salad (can’t have Tday without this one!)
• Cranberry Compote
• Yams with marshmallows and raisins
• Fresh green beans
• Party Potatoes (these things rock!)
• Raviolis (ok so Stegret really made these, but I did help out!)

After Tday we headed out to Bocca and then South Beach to remember what night life was like. In Bocca we visited the beach and “Dr. Rob” (his brother). Dr. Rob has a sweet place which I’m not even going to try and describe because I won’t do it justice, but we took a lot of pictures so you can get the gist. In addition to having a nice place Dr. Rob is also a really great guy! Good stuff. We are both hoping that him and his gfriend come out and visit soon. After visiting with the bro we then headed off to South Beach. We found our hotel 5min before the final check-in time of midnight. Turns out our hotel was also a dance club. Go figure. Once Stegret found the checkin desk (it was next to the DJ) we were informed that we would not be staying there and had gotten an “upgrade”. The new place (The Chelsea) was a 98% gay art deco hotel that had really good pillows and an “Adult Safety Kit”. The hotel was decent enough, but they were really unorganized at the front desk. Both days I asked for a wake up call and both days I got none. They valet parked our car for us, but instead of the 20 min they told it would take to retrieve it took about an hour each time! Oh well there was a nice patio with umbrellas and couches that we could sit on and enjoy the sun while we waited for the car. The good news is when we checked out they accidentally only charged us for one night so it turned out to be quite a deal!

So it’s nice to be home, but when next month rolls around and we fly off to Oregon to visit my family I’m not going to complain!