I have two things to talk about tonight, but I think I shall seperate them into two different articles.

First we have thanksgiving. This year was my first year celebrating this particular holiday. For those not in America (and have never been) let me fill you in. As far as I can tell, this is a day of celebrating family and friends. You all get together, eat, drink, and be merry. It seems to be a bit of a competition for who can have the largest party though. All week I have heard people trying to out do each other on the number of people they have attending thier particular 'gathering'. Myself, comming from a small family, was not quiet prepared for how full-on a large family gather can be.

A family, who is a friend of a friend of keith's, took us in for thanksgiving. All up there was probably about 20 of us for dinner. This may not be a large gathering compared to some of the others I heard of, but to me, it was huge.

The drive over was pretty cool. It was the other side of the sound from seattle, so we needed to take a ferry accross the sound, then drive around the olympic mountain range. Some very nice scenery out that way.

The dish of choice is turkey (apparently they don't have turkey at christmas, WTF ?). Ours was smoked, and it was FANTASTIC. I am a huge turkey fan, and this one was pretty damn good. There was also ham, and a number of other side dishes.

Apart from eating, we also played a lot of cards. I learnt a few new variations of poker (chicago, baseball, 2 - 22, 8 - 28, no-peaking & others), and also learnt to play cribbage.

Also found out, that if you fold down the back seat in a mazda 3, inflate an airbed, its actually kinda comfortable to sleep there.

Some photo's from the trip can be found here.