Thanksgiving & getaways

We had a wonderful Thanksgiving holiday. Jen & Luis flew in on Thanksgiving morning and we wouldn't let them rest. They had to stay up ALL day, even after gorging ourselves with turkey at Greg & Bethany's. Greg & Bethany invited some friends from work and we started our Thanksgiving day with drinking apple cider (Jen needs the recipe, B), then vino, then we ate, then we witnessed our own Rockette's (thank you B & Tyler), watched a little Macy's Day Parade, went out for an afternoon stroll to enjoy the views, watched ELF, and then, when we thought we couldn't keep Jen & Luis up any longer, we decided to retire home so we could wake up early for a 8-9am departure for our driving trip to Salzburg & Berchtesgaden.

The 8-9am departure turned in to a 1130am departure. Well, besides the obvious of wanting to sleep in, we had a bit of a difficulty convincing Tucker he WAS coming on the trip. He slipped out the front door and decided he wasn't quite ready to leave~@ 30-45 min later, we tricked him into the newly fenced doggy-play area with me pretending to start the lawn mower (get's him everytime...watch, just jinxed myself now). Tucker has a fear of the lawnmower, so Jen, of course after catching some of this on video tape, helped me trap the stubborn bugger.

We drove in caravan with Bethany & Greg & played games on the walkie talkies on the drive up. We were driving towards the snow, for sure! We stayed at Hotel Hoher Goell (www.hohergoell.de) and enjoyed some yummy German food and Christmas markets in the downtown area of Berchtesgaden. The next day we drove over to Salzburg for some more Christmas markets and snow! We froze a bit, but hot chocolate warmed us up and we continued to enjoy the Christmas spirit. We left on Sunday, but not after the chance of using our newly purchased and over-priced Snow Chains!!! After some near misses of a car almost sliding into my car, we determined it would be best to apply the snow chains as we didn't want to spend the rest of the day just standing in the snow, watching the guys push up yet another car.

Jen & Luis' visit continued in Italy. We had a local day on Monday of going to Maniago for the weekly market, attempted to go to closed wineries (bummer) and then off to the streets of Pordenone.