Thanksgiving Week

This year for Thanksgiving we decided to head west and visit Jason and Marcie in Champaign.

They had come to our house last year, so it was only fair to return the favor.

And it's also nice that they finally left Mississippi so we could go someplace new.

AND

it doesn't hurt that they live in the same town as the Stone family, Andy's good friends from when he was a kid in Tucson.

Serendipidous, really.

But, before we left I talked Andy into entering a 10k race with me.

It was held at Quantico, and we had fun running together.

Our finish time was 56:59.

I'll have to convince him to race with me more.

Don't pay too much attention to Andy's shirt.  He accidentally wore my x-small instead of his large.

OK, so I might have handed him the wrong one, without bothering to look...oops.

When we got to Champaign we did a lot of just hanging out with the Christensens and Stones.

And I'm pretty bad at taking pictures.

We haven't had many lately.

We did go to a pretty good Children's Museum in Bloomington, though.  The kids had tons of fun.

I thought this window was ingenious for kids.

They got to paint all over the thing, then just spray and wipe it down into the sinks below when they were done.

Since we were in the middle of Farmland, USA, we got to learn all about how wheat is processed into things like cereal.  Everyone needs to know about that.

We had a great Thanksgiving meal, as well.

Jason and Marcie had bought a turkey fryer because the were concerned about the quality of the oven in their rental house.

Andy looked up a recipe for the turkey, and ended up rubbing huge amounts of cayenne pepper, black pepper, garlic and onion powders and cajun seasoning all over the turkey before sticking it in the fryer.  The Sones came over, and Jason, Andy and Jon all hovered around the fryer in the backyard for a few hours, making sure they think didn't explode. 

We were a little unsure of how this turkey was going to turn out, and when the guys pulled it out of the fryer, Marcie and I about had a heart attack because the thing look like a giant piece of charcoal.

(Where is my picture?!?)

It was pretty scary!

At THAT point Andy assures us that that is how the recipe said it would look.  I was still a lot skeptical, but when they sliced into it, the meat looked great. 

Whew!

Dinner saved.

We ate too much, as is often the case on holidays.

Then next day we drove 40 minutes away to Kickapoo, a natural area, to find some 'hiking'.  It was a beautiful day, and a really pretty area, but with all of us being from Colorado, we decided that it didn't really qualify as hiking.

Oh well, fun nonetheless.

Too soon we had to make the long, 12-hour drive back home to Virginia.

At least we have some family within driving distance!