Thanksgiving, being the middle child of holidays that it is, occasionally gets overlooked. Between its creepy brother Halloween and flashy sister Christmas, poor Thanksgiving sometimes becomes nearly an afterthought. However, since I am fond of gorging with family, I’ve never been guilty of such neglect.
Wendy unveiled the mysteries of crust formation.
Thanksgiving provides an excellent excuse to spend hours preparing from-scratch dishes and reminiscing with relatives. One or two of you may recall that last year I vowed to bake homemade piecrusts this Thanksgiving and I’m happy to report that I made it so. My friend Wendy graciously showed me her crust secrets and I, in return, tutored her on the correct way to make some Southern fillings. Thanks to Wendy’s wise teachings, I made French coconut pie, frozen lemonade pie and my standard sweet-potato pie entirely from scratch this year. Who’s the pie master?
Here’s the proof that I did indeed create my own crusts.
Our Thanksgiving began earlier than normal this time with us donning Mayflower attire and racing around the Thanksgiving Point golf course in the Pilgrim Run. It was a pretty frigid morning but the “historical” wears were quite hilarious and worth facing the gnawing winter for.
I hope the pilgrims didn’t look this ridiculous coming off the Mayflower.
Holiday sneer?
The rest of our day was spent with our families in the usual chaotic fashion. Between games of Rise of Augustus and animated discussions about Black Friday strategies, the day was gone remarkably fast leaving fond memories and too-full bellies in its hectic wake.
Not all of my family was around for Thanksgiving dinner but plenty were present.
Thanksgiving, you may be doomed to be forgotten between the hordes of costumed kids pursuing candy and the scourges of savage shoppers seeking Christmas, but I vow to always honor you with an endless offering of pies and what feels like an endless amount of family bonding.
It was my turn to host my Bunco group last month. I decided that Girls Rock would be my theme this time, a celebration of all things girly. Since I’m particularly passionate about the power of women, this motif seemed not only fun but fitting.
I arranged thirteen vases of flowers of varying style and size for this affair.
I, along with my helpful assistant Jason, made fresh-squeezed lemonade, various types of cookies, phyllo-wrapped asparagus and a classy cheese platter for this event. These freshly prepared treats were supplemented with delicious cake bites from The Sweet Tooth Fairy. I made sure all the victuals were presented with the frills and fanciness that the theme demanded.
I decorated red velvet cookies with swirls of cream cheese frosting, dusting sugar and pansies made out of icing.
All the ladies went home with a vase of flowers.
But sugar-crusted sweets and mint-garnished drinks weren’t enough in themselves to create a woman wonderland. I built a playlist with all the girly standards from Alanis Morissette to Avril Lavigne, plus a few of my offbeat personal favorites, so my halls could be filled with the sounds of rockin’ femininity.
This was just one of the many bouquets I put together.
I also decided to cover my house with bouquets of flowers, as if the girly refreshments and racquet weren’t enough. Floral arranging is a hobby of mine so I may have taken this portion of my plan a bit overboard. I packed thirteen vases with a variety of blooms and let my guests each pick one to take home with them.
I made sure the spread didn’t disappoint on the girly scale.
Bunco was stuffed with ruffles, blossoms and pinkness. And, more importantly, it was filled with the laughter of intelligent ladies exchanging ideas and enjoying each other’s company, which speaks more to the success of the evening than any overabundance of cheese or flowering vegetation ever could.
Moab is one of my favorite places on planet Earth, well the entire Solar System really. Jason and I just made our biannual trip to its weather-sculpted plateaus and untouched deserts that feel a bit like home to us…a home with an infinite crawl space. We spent three days seeking out adventure in its unexplored routes and novel crevices. Seek and ye shall find fun, or so I hear.
The switchbacks descending into Mineral Bottom seemed never ending on the way down and a lot more never ending on the way back up.
The hype surrounding the White Rim Trail has always made Jason and me curious…and skeptical. This 100-mile-long 4WD road below the Island in the Sky District of Canyonlands National Park could possibly be the most popular scenic ride anywhere. Between the 4WDs, dirt bikes and mountain bikes, it apparently becomes a crammed freeway during peak season. Experiencing the marvels of “peaceful solitude” alongside throngs of people? No thanks. That’s why Jason and I thought we’d give this famous path a try while the nature-obsessed hordes were absent thanks to the nearness of winter. We only saw a couple of 4WDs and a handful of bikers our entire day on the rim. Hallelujah for November!
Jason took this picture of me from one switchback up. It looks like an aerial shot.
The White Rim Trail practically jumps into the Green River.
We accessed the White Rim via Mineral Bottom Road, hopping on our bikes right before this path plunges to the actual bottom of Mineral Bottom over a series of gnarly switchbacks. We sped past the remains of four or five cars that had probably dived over the side of this narrow thoroughfare many years ago. Unsettling. Once we finished our descent to the river, our journey became practically effortless. White Rim is neither technically challenging nor physically difficult, apart from the brutal climb necessary to emerge from its bottom. In fact, I would venture that it’s the easiest trail we’ve ever done in Moab.
The weather was pleasant in Moab but extra layers were necessary off and on. I got sick of pulling off and on my arm warmers so in a ridiculous halfway-state they stayed.
Was it worthy of all the hype? Not really. Towering plateaus with odd-shaped crowns encircled us and the Green River nonchalantly sprawled out at our feet surrounded by a halo of yellowing leaves but, as ideal as that setting sounds, the scenery was not any prettier than some we’ve witnessed at other less-acclaimed locations. With the seclusion we enjoyed that day, this ride was well worth it but would it be worth it in the presence of an endless caravan of tourists bent on experiencing the “wilderness”? Absolutely not. There are plenty of gorgeous places around Moab where you can enjoy nature’s exquisiteness without nature’s plague, AKA man.
This beautiful overlook on the Portal Trail marked the beginning of the ill-advised portion of the path.
Signs such as this were posted at several points on the Portal Trail.
Thanks to the time change, we only had enough daylight to bike a little over 20 miles of the White Rim but, with the 1000-foot ascent out of Mineral Bottom squished into a fraction of a mile, we got a hardy workout anyway.
Do you see a path in the middle of this cliff? No? There is one: the perilous Portal Trail.
Our second day in Moab is traditionally our hiking day. We give our sore butts a brief breather and use our feet for something besides pedaling. This time we packed our hiking day with not one but two adventures. First, we hit the infamous Portal Trail. Why is it infamous you ask? For starters, it’s one of the most dangerous trails in the world and has claimed the lives of three bikers. This route is a thousand feet up from the valley floor and right, and I mean right, on the edge of a 200-foot cliff. A three-foot ledge between the precipice above and the precipice below is all you’ve got to travel on and, believe me, it’s not much. It was scary enough just walking it, I can’t imagine the level of derangement necessary to consider biking it. The views of the Colorado River, too far below, were amazing but I found myself hugging the path while those precarious heights made me a little woozy. Beauty and terror: sounds more like your typical dating scene than a leisurely trip down a little portal.
False Kiva is tucked away in a hidden cave on the side of a rock face.
The area around Moab has so much geological diversity that the terrain looks completely different from one spot to the next.
After our 5-mile trek through the Portal of Death, Jason and I went on a different kind of adventure, the secret kind. False Kiva, so named because its origins are unknown, is a round stone structure built in a remote cave in the Island in the Sky District of Canyonlands National Park. Don’t bother looking for a trail to it on your park map, you won’t find one. While the 1.6-mile route to the kiva is pretty well-marked, the debate on whether to disclose the exact location of this archeological site has never been resolved and so it remains semi-concealed. We had a great time wandering the hush-hush path to this cave and photographing its cryptic kiva. Nothing makes something more fascinating than a secret.
These nameless precipices provided an excellent viewpoint from which to gawk at the Book Cliffs.
The ride to the Book Cliffs overlook crossed a steep tongue of slickrock.
Our last day in Moab we decided to divert from the beaten path even more than usual and take a little-known 4WD trail up to an obscure viewpoint overlooking the Book Cliffs. The Book Cliffs are the longest continuous escarpment in the world, traveling through a hundred miles of Utah and Colorado. The path we rode to “view” them was a little less than six miles total but it was so swathed in loose stones that it took us three hours to complete this outing. Although the panoramas of the Book Cliffs from the overlook were splendid, we found the unnamed precipices that the overlook itself was located on to be more interesting. We paused for an awesome snack break on their brink above Salt Valley’s beautiful desolation. What a nice, although rocky, little jaunt.
The “road” to the Book Cliffs overlook was as rocky as they come and very tricky to ride.
Moab, our favorite nature-made playground, again proved itself superior to any manufactured monkey-bars. We tired ourselves out pedaling its rimmed plateaus, discovered a few of its guarded secrets and witnessed some of its greatest dangers. It’s hard to cram that much intrigue into three days but somehow we managed.
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