November 30th, 2007 nick
Thanksgiving was fantastic, as usual. Non-stop laughingcookingplayingeatingdrinking made for an amazing weekend. The food was better than usual. This was the second year in a row that we brined the turkeys (both the fryer and the roaster) and we’re definitely not going back. Both birds were scrumptious — and the fried one had a nice kick from the whiskey/pomegranate/citrus/cajun flavor injection.
We invented a new floppy disc game this year called Orbit. Imagine a circular patch of asphalt with small circle of earth and a tree in the middle. Add in a floppy disc, some playful and competition-starved ultimate players and stir. We were still ironing out the fine points of the rules when we stopped playing after a few hours. And by ironing out, I of course mean arguing vociferously about.
Oodles of photos are up on the 6thandcollege gallery.
This little story (as told by Johanna in a recent email) paints the end-of-weekend picture very accurately:
…as i steered the nissan sentra towards the on-ramp of i-876 near kip and aaron’s house i leaned over and asked nick what his highlight from thanksgiving had been. i got no response. nick was sound asleep… but when he woke up 5 minutes later, the first words he said were “it’s exhausting having so much fun”.
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November 26th, 2007 nick
In a last-minute decision, Kroody and I biked most of the way to Thanksgiving dinner in Pittsburgh. After realizing that we weren’t going to be able to bike all the way there from Baltimore, we scrambled on Friday (the 16th) to find the best way to get ourselves a good head start. Johanna (generously) offered to drive us up to Frederick or Harper’s Ferry, but we wanted to get a little further on. Amtrak goes to Cumberland (a perfect starting point) but we couldn’t take our bikes on the train because it’s too small a station and they don’t have access to the baggage car there. We ended up renting a car (“Drive for climate“, Kroody kept mumbling) and driving a small (gulp) SUV one-way out to Cumberland where we dropped it off at Wayne’s Citgo, loaded up the ponies and rode out along the Allegheny Passage rail-to-trail path headed uphill.
Two days, two cold nights, 150 miles and one flask of moonshine later, we rolled into Pittsburgh up to Kip and Aaron’s front door. It was a sweet trip. It snowed when we were at 2300 feet. It was 55 on the last day. On Monday, we got up at 4:30AM, were on the trail by 5, had a few hours of night biking punctuated only by the loud trains huffing and puffing along the other side of the Youghiogheny River with their bright front lights backlighting leafless trees and shining eerily off the early morning misty water.
Check out the photos from the trip.
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