Thanksgiving Trip to Dallas
Nov 26th, 2007 by Bethany
I've been in Dallas, Texas, for the last few days on our Thanksgiving vacation. Our friends, Ashley and Justin, invited us to stay with them and celebrate Thanksgiving with them this year and we happily took them up on their offer. My sister Phoebe and her husband John live nearby and were invited to join us and it was nice to be with both family and friends for the holiday since we're pretty far from "home."
We had a wonderful traditional Thanksgiving meal, successfully cooked entirely by Ashley, Phoebe, and myself (an impressive accomplishment since none of us youngins' had ever done such a thing on our own). The turkey was relatively moist AND cooked all the way through. Ashley had heard that if you turn the turkey breast-side down while roasting it increases the moistness of the white meat, so we tried it and it seemed to work, although it did make the presentation of the turkey a little less than traditional with horizontal marks from the roasting basket. We also had creamy mashed potatoes, turkey gravy, fresh white rolls, cranberry sauce, and fruit salad. For dessert, we made four pies: pumpkin (from scratch–we actually cooked a pumpkin for it), chocolate cream with oreos on top, lemon meringue with out the meringue (no one in our group is crazy about meringue), and apple. Everything was yummy enough to enjoy three days later.
I got to go house shopping with Phoebe and John and we saw lots of houses. It looks like whatever they get will be good, since all the houses we saw were certainly acceptable, though some were better than others. It's always interesting to look at other peoples' houses. We saw one where there were two bathrooms in the master bedroom, connected only through the shower. Weird. Then there was a really big house on a tiny lot–the backyard was smaller than the kitchen. Then there was the house that had tile almost everywhere, and the few places they had carpet were badly stained. Oh, and there's a problem with houses where people have smoked–it's impossible to get the smell out and non-smokers don't like it. So don't smoke in your house if you ever plan to sell it. Actually, just don't smoke.
We got home last night around 8:30pm and it was such a relief that we had left it clean. It wasn't until I'd been married for a while that I understood why my mom was so adamant about leaving the house clean when we went anywhere as a family. It's because she wanted to be happy to come home and see a clean house instead of being overwhelmed and depressed by the prospect of more work than unpacking. I just can't say enough how nice it was to come home to a vacuumed house where the dishes were done and the laundry was clean.