East Coast Thanksgiving

This year, it was time for a Crabtree Thanksgiving. Since leaving VA in the future was on the horizon, everyone opted to come here for the holiday. My grandpa and uncle live in MD so we decided to spend Thanksgiving Day with them also.

My mom flew into Richmond on Tuesday evening and we went to dinner and ran some errands to get ready for the feast. Colby, Talyn, and my Dad flew into Baltimore Tuesday night and C&T spend Wednesday seeing some old friends while Dad went golfing with Grandpa and James. Wednesday morning, Aaron and I went to work and school and my mom stayed at our place and got to work with some meal preparations. We had ordered a "happy" turkey from Polyface farm and she gutted and brined it. We drove up to DC and made it in time for dinner at Grandpa's favorite chinese place. We exchanged gifts that night - we got Grandpa a Samsung Galaxy tablet so he can keep up with the times.

Grandpa doesn't like to keep the heat on very long at his house - so mom made sure we had Ugg slippers to keep us warm.

On Thanksgiving Day, we woke up and used some FNCE coupons for breakfast at McDonald's. The boys placed soccer outside (Grandpa didn't have a football?) and we got ready for the day and started cooking dinner. Grandpa's oven apparently only had one setting - HOT - and luckily my mom was able to rescue the turkey and prevent it from completely drying out. We enjoyed our dinner and we went to see Skyfall that night.

The  glorious Polyface turkey

"Football"

Feasting

The next morning, we enjoyed Grandpa's buttermilk hotcakes for breakfast before leaving. We headed to Montpelier in Orange, VA - James Madison's home (and stopped for Cafe Rio on the way). We also enjoyed the Richmond tacky light tour that evening and dinner at Silver Diner.

Saturday we went to Jamestown and Yorktown and enjoyed the tours. We were tired from a long day so that evening we ordered pizza from Bottom's Up and stayed in and played games.

Sunday morning was probably was I was looking forward to the most - Sunday Brunch at the Jefferson Hotel! Not only did we get to enjoy the brunch, but we also got to see the hotel decked out for Christmas. It was a lovely breakfast and the food was pretty good. Yum! Colby and Talyn had to head back up to DC to fly out that night and so Mom, Dad, Aaron and I visited St John's Church (site of Patrick Henry's famous speech) and the Wilton House and ate at Cafe Caturra before they caught their evening plane home to TX.