Our Thanksgiving Dinner

Our second ever family vacation–that was strictly a vacation.

My family has always been very traditional about Thanksgiving.  Everything was always cooked from scratch.  My family kind of snickers at the fact that I use a box for the dressing.  The dressing was never my favorite thing about the Thanksgiving dinner and seems to me one of the things that takes the longest to prepare.  Since I am the lone cook as of yet in my household, the dressing is one thing that I don’t mind cheating on, but for the most part I too enjoy cooking the whole Thanksgiving spread.

This year however, I didn’t do it, at all.  After much discussion my husband and I decided to leave on Thanksgiving Day for our family vacation to Florida.  I didn’t really think I’d miss it.

Let me back track for a moment for your general amusement.  Something has to go wrong every trip doesn’t it?  Two days before the air conditioner went out on my conversion van.  I noticed that though it was cooling, it wasn’t keeping up like it normally did.  And yes in winter in Texas we still run the air conditioner.  Hey with highs in the 80s it gets hot in there!  So we took the van in.  They said it would take weeks to order the parts and that it’s going to cost almost two thousand dollars!  So no thanks to them we got our van back with the air completely not working and no hope of getting it fixed before the trip.  🙁  I’m going to blame the shop for the fact that as we began to pack the van the night before Jason found that the dome light had been left on and the battery was dead.  No, we didn’t have jumper cables.  Jason made a mad dash to the store and finally got the van running about midnight.  Well that was at least an improvement from the last trip when we found the battery dead the morning of our trip.  Ahem!

So Thanksgiving morning we set out on our family adventure.  Excitement was high even though we had two whole days of travel before reaching our destination.  On the way I Googled places to eat Thanksgiving dinner and was excited to find that Cracker Barrel offers a compete dinner including drink and dessert for $8.99.  Ya can’t beat that.  I quickly found one on the way and just in time for an early lunch.  Except as we drove up it seemed that everyone had the same idea.  The place was packed!  No way were we going to wait around for hours on our trip.  We were disappointed but traveled on, but later we came to another Cracker Barrel in the afternoon that was almost empty.  And that’s where we feasted and thanked God for all of our blessings!

The meal was good, but definitely not like home.  I actually really did miss all of our family recipes and our extended family as well, but this was a great meal for our travels.  My kids really liked the food too, but said it wasn’t as good as I make…except for the dressing they said!

Find the next episode of our vacation here: Busch Gardens Tampa Florida.