Thanksgiving in Vermont

We spent our second Thanksgiving in a cosy lake-side cabin in beautiful Vermont with Columbia friends. 

We left New York after work on Wednesday night (both cars laden with food and drink including the all important turkey), arrived after 1am and pretty much fell straight into bed. 

I was very happy to wake up on Thanksgiving morning, pull back the curtains and see the above view out of our window.

Our home for the weekend on Lake Rescue

We felt kind of like nine Europeans pretending to be an American family at Thanksgiving! 

We started the day with a very tasty American pancake breakfast followed by a nice walk round the lake to take in our surroundings and rebuild our appetite for the main event.

 Then it was all hands on deck for a lovely relaxed afternoon of cooking...

 The turkey was very much a group effort!

And then we ate far, far too much food..

Followed by more wine, amazing pumpkin cake and games in front of the fire.

The best thing about Thanksgiving is that when it's over there are still 3 more days before you have to go back to work!

We spent the remainder of our Vermont weekend going on walks, making good use of the canoes that came with the house, visiting the maple syrup producer next door, eating, drinking, playing games and generally relaxing.

Hike up Okemo Mountain with spectacular views at top

Unfortunately we completely misjudged how long it would take and ended up walking down in the dark - which was a little challenging! Thank goodness for Iphones and the torch app!

Happy Holidays!

I cannot believe that on this day last year we had just arrived in New York and were heading out for our first NYC dinner.

Wow. What a year it has been!

(view of Manhattan from our plane journey back from Montreal)

Last Thanksgiving we chased the Macy's parade around midtown and then ate pasta from paper plates in our unfurnished apartment! 

This year we hope to be watching the parade on TV from the cosy cabin in the Vermont countryside where we will be spending the holiday with friends. 

Happy Thanksgiving! xx

Happy Holidays!

Thursday was our first Thanksgiving!

As we had no furniture or kitchen appliances at that point we refrained from attempting a full on turkey dinner but we did go see the famous Macy's parade. I know it's for children but it's our first thanksgiving! What we discovered at about 9.30 in the morning is that apparently people go from 6am in order to get a good viewing spot so by the time we got there we were at the back of a very large crowd. Note the families who brought stepladders to improve their view!

However it was a lovely festive atmosphere and I was totally fascinated to observe lots of real New York families in situ.

Parade chasing... (whilst doing my bit for Edinburgh tourism)

And a giant flying Kermit!

A very friendly American tourist insisted on taking our picture in front of these giant Christmas baubles

It was a gorgeous sunny and crisp day so we took a lovely walk home along the full length of Central Park. The views were incredible! I cannot wait to explore the park properly and am very happy that it's so close to our flat. Oh, and apparently it's quite geologically interesting too. Bonus!

We will definitely be back for some Christmas skating here, so festive!

View from west side (our side) of the reservoir. Pretty sure this is where Charlotte and her dogs run girls!

All in all a great first Thanksgiving. I hope that my next year we will be all set up to do it properly but this year we were very happy eating pasta off plastic plates in our furniture-less flat!