Well kids, it's been a while. I have pretty good excuses for not blogging, however. One being that I was in foreign lands. You can read about all of that
here. Beyond that, I have had very few overnights as I typically prefer either locals or redeyes. In fact, for the upcoming month of December, I will be home every night except a red-eye to San Antonio. I recently returned from another trip to Guanajuato in Mexico, but my grand plans to further explore the surrounding areas failed abysmally. Apparently I have never been in town on a Saturday and everything was packed. No food, no mummy museum, no room to walk. Other crew members took a cab to Leon to buy shoes on the cheap, but their journey took 5x longer than it should have due to a soccer match and a balloon festival taking place in the city. So that's that. After this trip, I had a couple of locals to not so far off places like Denver and Phoenix and then found myself home for Thanksgiving despite not even asking for it off. Tis the game we play.
With just three days off, I didn't really have time to go away, so I elected to stay put and relax. I convinced my parents to fly to Hawaii via Austin, where I could physically fly them to LAX for their connecting flight to Lihue. It would be the first time they had been passengers with me behind the controls since I took them on a trip to Santa Barbara in a small Piper Cherokee. Without much drama, they were able to fly standby on all of their flights and found themselves back in LA for Thanksgiving after galavanting with the menehunes and eating poi.
Whereas the rest of the country seemed to be averaging highs in the 20s and 30s, Los Angeles was hitting 85 every day with ease. We took advantage by trying to be outside whether that was walking along the beach at sunset or standing in line at Randy's for some donuts.
As none of us are terribly keen on actual turkey, I prepared a beef brisket as our main course. I made croque madames on San Francisco sourdough bread for lunch. It was certainly not a traditional thanksgiving, though we did have some pumpkin pie because it was on sale at Ralph's for $3.99.
While waiting for the slow-cooker to do its work on the brisket, I took the folks to Venice beach so that they can be thankful for not living in Venice beach. One would have had no idea it was Thanksgiving. It was packed and all the stores were open.
I suggested we rent metrobikes and go down the bike path. With a little nudging, they were convinced. We rode to the Santa Monica pier and back. All in all, not a bad Thanksgiving. I go to many places and write about all of my adventures, but sometimes it's nice to just appreciate what I have in my own backyard. Mmmmm donuts.
