Days 2-4: Thanksgiving

This is the 4th Thanksgiving we’ve celebrated as nomads, and it feels like we’ve now covered the entire range of possibilities.

• 2021: A restaurant/brewery in Northern California that was doing a Thanksgiving menu.
• 2022: A family celebration, at Rett’s dad’s in New York, with her sister and sister’s boyfriend.
• 2023: At a primitive campground in New Zealand, where a box of stuffing and a can of chicken hit the required notes surprisingly well.
• 2024: A home-cooked extravaganza, with just the two of us.

(Though maybe 2025 will best my imagination and further expand the range?)

We booked a place (with a full kitchen!) in St. Augustine for a week, partly because we wanted to see St. Augustine, but mostly because we wanted to create our own Thanksgiving feast. Rett had found a website with a collection of Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter-themed recipes she wanted to try, and while none of them were “traditional Thanksgiving”, they were within the same satisfying sphere, so we selected six of them, made massive trip to the Publix grocery store (we rode over with 8 empty panniers), and got to work.

Only when we were done cooking did we realize that it was perhaps the most “from scratch” menu we’ve ever made. Frozen puff pastry dough (for roasted grape and goat cheese tarts) was the most pre-made/processed ingredient that we used. Otherwise, the pumpkin rolls were made with canned pumpkin and yeast, the butter was spiced and whipped by ourselves, the arugula/mint “pesto” for the lamb chops was processed in the Ninja blender (which was a lucky item included in the kitchen!), and the butterscotch sauce and whipped cream that topped our pudding never saw a can.

Maybe our subconscious intentions drove that style of cooking? On normal days, even when we “cook” for ourselves rather than eating fast food, it’s frequently just a mix of two or three packaged items. And even moreso over these last couple of weeks when we’ve been staying in a lot of motels, where the microwave limits our options far more than we can do with our camp kitchen. So maybe our bodies were craving “real” ingredients, with a minimum of industrial chemicals and preservatives?

Or maybe we just wanted some good-ass food, and the best way to guarantee that is to do every last bit by ourselves. And it worked! For an untested, unreviewed website (ok, Rett had tried the braised cabbage/apples in New Jersey), each of the six of the recipes was a grand slam. They came together to produce the best meal we’ve had since Hobbiton in New Zealand, and maybe even before that.

Perhaps one reason that the meal was so incredibly satisfying is that it proved that even though we’re “homeless” now, when we drop back into a house, we can still flip the switch, go hard, and home-make with the best of them.

To walk off our meal, we strolled a few blocks west and halfway across the Bridge of Lions, just to get a preview of the lit-up city of St. Augustine that we would explore further in the coming days. Once we finish our hundredth round of dishes (a dishwasher is the one thing that was missing!)

Days 5-7

Friday was a much-needed “recovery” day from our work and gluttony, but Saturday night we returned across the Bridge of Lions to explore downtown St. Augustine on foot. It’s rare for us to see a place for the first time at night (heck, it’s rare for us to go anywhere at night!), but the Nights of Lights festival meant that we had no problem seeing the shape of the place.

And what a shape it was! Ever since my Aunt Janet and Uncle Milan began wintering in St. Augustine decades ago, I knew it was a unique, historical place in Florida, but somehow I didn’t predict that it would join with the duo of Charleston and Savannah to form a triptych. But retrospect it’s obvious: South Carolina, Georgia, and now Florida each have a coastal, living-museum city to call their own. The historic core of St. Augustine is smaller than its northern siblings (though it has a much-older origin!), but the shop-lined pedestrianized alleyways bring a similar old-world atmosphere.

It was cold and it was crowded, two things that are normally a negative, but on this Florida night, both added to the festive atmosphere. It was “only” in the low 50s, but it was breezy, and that made it cold enough to eliminate the incongruity I normally feel when I see Christmas scenes in warm climates.

The next morning we thought we should at least see if the city felt different under the natural light of day, and yes, the warmth of the sun and the deep blue skies created an entirely different feeling. There were also far fewer tourists on the streets, and we even explored an outdoor-museum-y part of the Colonial Quarter that we weren’t entirely sure if we were allowed to be in. We walked around the Castillo de San Marcos, but didn’t have time or the inclination to pay to enter the National Monument. Seeing other tourists inside up on the ramparts was good enough for me to get a sense of the scale of the fortress walls.