a warm thanksgiving

Thanksgiving break was wonderful and filled with sand and food, but not at the same time.  Ok, some of it was at the same time, but there wasn't any sand in the food.  I'm saying we went to the beach and ate a lot.  

 It was a traditional Thanksgiving break for us, which means we started off with the Gobble Your Gibblets 5K Race at USC Upstate.  This is a tough course with lots of hills but I've gotten a little faster each year.  This year was my best time yet.  G had me at 20:45 but the official time was 20:48.  That was good enough for me to be 4th place overall and 1st in my age group.  

Violet held the turkey trophy while we posed in front of my sculpture on the Upstate campus.

 The tradition also takes us to my mom's for superb home cooked food.

 This was the aftermath.

 Later that afternoon we arrived at the edge of the country to see this perfect view.  Then we headed out to our annual Thanksgiving night meal out.

 The day after Thanksgiving was beautiful and unseasonably warm.  As the temperatures rose to the low 70s we hit the sand in our bathing suits.  We played for a bit before going for our next tradition, the McAbee Polar Plunge.

Beach Friday isn't complete without a stop by the Lazy Gator and dinner at Russell's.  We haven't seen the resident gator in a while so the kids got a little complacent.

 And that's how people get eaten.

 Violet was the appetizer and Blue was the main course.

 The inlet is stunning.  The broad horizon, the sky reflecting on the water, the salt hanging in the air...it's a highlight of every trip to the beach.

 The enormous amount of food we consumed made each morning run a bit tough.  But running at the beach is so nice.  There's so much beauty that it's easy to forget that you're running.  And when you're out on the beach early, you get to find the cool treasures that wash up overnight.

 Just like Charlie Brown says each year, consumerism is doing it's best to destroy Christmas.  This year, the consumerist greed moved the official arrival of Santa at The Market Common a week before Thanksgiving weekend.  This meant Blue didn't get to tell Santa what he wanted in person.  It also meant Violet didn't have to be terrified of the nice bearded man in the red suit.  Still we enjoyed the decorations.

 And the weather on Saturday was just as nice.  We spent even more time on the beach and I think I got a little sun on my head.

In the absence of Santa, we hijacked his sleigh and ate more food before returning home to prepare for the last week of classes.

beachgiving

 Thanksgiving is a great time of year.  It's Thanksgiving which means a short break from school and good turkey cooked by my mom, but it also means a trip to the beach and the start of the Christmas season.

As usual, I got up early on Thanksgiving day and headed to USC Upstate for the Gobble Your Gibblets 5K.  It's a race around their campus sponsored by their cross country team and for a person who runs on relatively flat surfaces everyday, it's an excruciating race of hills, somehow managing to feel uphill every step of the way.  This year I talked the family into coming to watch so brother Daniel would have some company since he decided not to run.

G put together this collage of photos that she took.  The first image is just a mile into the race.  There was a very small kid running in front of me at that point.  I'm thankful he's not in the photo making me look bad.  Eventually I passed him and some other high school cross country kids from the area.  There was this one guy ahead of me the whole time and about halfway through I started to think I may have a chance at winning my age group.  I'm not a good judge of age but he looked like he could be close so I made him my target.  There's a really nasty mountain to run up in the last mile and I got just ahead of him there.  I could hear his footsteps right behind me the rest of the race.  When we approached the finish line I knew he was going to make a go at passing me.  I pretty much put everything I had left into sprinting the last tenth of a mile.  As I sped up, his footsteps got more and more faint.  So I beat him and I beat my time from last year by about 30 seconds.  Then I ended up winning my the male 40-49 age group.  I think Violet was more excited than I was.  She and Blue were thrilled with the trophy.  Thanksgiving was off to a great start.

 If I haven't made this abundantly clear in the past, my mom is an excellent cook.  Think of all the famous chefs you know - all crap compared to her.  I arrived at her house early enough to start sampling the various turkeys.  All I had for breakfast was a banana so cut me some slack.  She deep fries her turkeys and she always spices one up with cajun spice and they are amazing.  Oh and she made a bacon peanut butter pie this year with a whole pound of bacon in it.  It was good, but we all agreed it may have been better without the bacon.  And that's the family up there.  Mom, my brothers, sisters in law and all the nieces and nephews.  And LJ took the photo for us.  She's our immediate family too.  Go ahead and count the kids.  One of my brothers was prolific.

 After lunch we grabbed our chocolate chip cookies for the road and headed toward the coast.  There are so many landmarks along the way that I use to mark the time and distance.  The interstates are so long but once you get off I-95 time speeds up a little.

 The kids get more and more excited as they see "beach trees" more often.  The sun was setting on the Intracoastal Waterway as we arrived.

 And it made for a nice balcony view after we threw our bags down.

 Thanksgiving dinner.  People always think it's weird that we have Thanksgiving dinner at TGI Fridays.  I'm not sure why.  There are always plenty of other people eating dinner there with us.  We do the family thing at lunch and have our own goofy thing for dinner.  G and I started making this trip years ago when no one went to Myrtle Beach at Thanksgiving.  The first year Domino's was the only restaurant we could find open.  Every year since then, more restaurants have been open and more people have been cluttering up our weekend.  We found TGI Fridays one year and it was warm enough to eat outside.  Since then it's been our go-to place for Thanksgiving dinner.

 The next morning we woke up to this.  Not bad, huh?

 After a chilly run we had Omega Pancake house for breakfast.  French toaaaaaaast!

Blue was apparently inspired by the Thanksgiving race and asked to run on the beach each afternoon.  He ran a mile with me each day and did really well.

 We often skip shopping in favor of playing on the beach on Beach Friday.  This one was pretty chilly so we carefully drove by a parking lot and when we saw that people were not parked all up in the grass like usual, we decided to give it a try.  The kids hate shopping but they were so excited about seeing their favorite man with facial hair that night...Russell.  Russell's is our favorite seafood place and Russell makes his rounds while we eat and has a good time going on with the kids.  Either he was running late or we were too early but we missed him this time.  Blue left him a drawing and a note and he headed out to see the other facial hair guy.

Santa arrived at Market Common and lit the Christmas tree.  Blue was excited and Violet burst into tears.  She likes the idea of Santa, but the real guy, not so much.

 Blue knows you have to get your specific requests in as early as possible.  He had a little chat, smiled for a photo and then headed for the ice cream place.  

 Another great sunrise and another beautiful day.

 We needed to wait a few hours after breakfast for the beach to warm up so G made a lap around the mall while I watched the kids play on the bouncy things.

 They ran wild for almost an hour and wore themselves out.

 The Carolina Clemson game was on so we watched a bit of it at Hamburger Joe's.

And then we hit the beach.  The kids played in the sand for a while and then Blue and I ran a little.  

 Then we played a little more in the sand.

 And then we got in the ocean.  G opted to stay dry and warm, but the rest of us got in.  It was cold.  Very cold.  

 We had some hot showers to warm up and cruised around Broadway for a while doing some Christmas shopping.

 The kids got in a little trouble and had to be put in the stocks.

 The seagulls posed for us before we left.

 The answer to the question "how close can you get before he flies away"?  That close.

 I love the beach at night.  You cant see the stars or hear the waves but trust me, it was beautiful.  Magnificent.  It was church.

 We headed back home early to beat the traffic and caught the sun rising somewhere near Florence.

Back home that afternoon my Nike+ running app finally synced properly and gave me credit for all my miles.  Now a couple of busy weeks before Christmas break.

thanksgiving and beach friday

I forget what happened for most of November this year, but the last few days of it were really nice.  

Brother Daniel couldn't run the Gobble Your Giblets 5K this year but he's the kind of brother who gets up early on Thanksgiving anyway just so he can come cheer his brother on and take a photo of him crossing the finish line.  He's a pretty good guy.  That's me in the super-cool white Lander University Sculpture shirt.  I ran hard, almost exploded on the killer hill and made good time, but still got beat by a lot of people.  It was fun.

 After the race, a drove to mom's to shower before the ginormous feast she prepared.  When I got out of my truck the first thing I saw was a large red tailed hawk circling low over the house.  Coincidence?  

Mom cooked again this year for more than 50 people.  And these are McAbee people mostly, with huge appetites.  I scoped out the desserts and piled my turkey and ham lightly so I would have room left for the sweet sampler platter.  We ate, we visited a bit and then we hit the road.

 Half of our Thanksgiving tradition is to feast at mom's with the entire McAbee family.  The other half is to hit the coast and enjoy the beach for the rest of the weekend.  We love the beach any time of year, but I always seem to enjoy it more when it's cold.  The light is great, the wind is brisk and everything is beautiful.  We made good time this year and caught the sunset just after check in.  I couldn't get that photo to load through iCloud....man, that iCloud is temperamental.  We had our usual Thanksgiving restaurant meal and the kids were so excited about being at the beach, they made sure we were up in time to catch the sunrise.

 G is shrinking, the kids are growing and just look at that light.  That blue....certainly worthy of naming your firstborn son, am I right?

 Violet in her happy place.  

 And Blue in his happy place.  It was still early on Beach Friday and it was cold.  Very cold.  But that didn't stop him from getting his pants soaked with sand and water from the knees down.

 Violet wanted to jump in the waves as we do in the summer.  She couldn't understand why we wouldn't be able to in late November.  The great parents we are, we thought we'd be clever and make this a teachable moment.  I led the kids in our swimsuits to the door and we bolted out across the sand to jump in the waves together.  We hit the cold water and of course, the kids didn't think it was nearly as cold as I did.  I made it out to knee deep water before my legs went numb.  We ran back inside to the warm pool area.  The kids had blue lips and their teeth were chattering and they were begging to go back to the ocean again.  So much for that plan.  The image above is when we went back out later and someone talked me into carrying them out into the water again.  I'm a sucker.

 Blue shares my appreciation for silly photos.  I talked him into wrestling with the alligator.

 And this year we tried to top our photo from last year.  Last time we posed him in front of the tree to make it appear he was blowing it over.  This year I jumped up into the tree and G timed it to look like I was being blown with the tree.  Not as good as last year, but still goofy.

 We are quick learners, though.  Last year we suffered through a Christmas program that was far too long for our collective attention spans.  This year we timed it just right so that when we finished our ice cream, we walked out just in time to see Santa arrive to light the Christmas tree at the Market Common.  We hit the book store while the people with patience waited in line to see Santa and when we came out again we walked right up and had our turn.  

Blue jumped right up and started sharing his list of "wants".  Violet wanted nothing to do with the bearded guy.  Eventually I slipped over and held her close to Santa and he leaned over and jolly talked her into almost smiling.  She said nothing, but she didn't scream, so I'm calling it a victory.  

Blue never stopped with his list the entire time.  He was listing things from the time he climbed up until we made him get down.  He seemed to be running out of ideas at the end because as he jumped down I heard him ask Santa for "one of those back massager things".  I asked what he meant and he said that sometimes his back itches where he can't scratch it and he needs something to reach it for him.  I suppose it's the simple things.

And now that Thanksgiving is done, these two are ready for Christmas.