A Different But Same Thanksgiving

 

This is what I needed this year.  Shingles tend to make you realize lots of different things!

This is only part of the family.  These are the ones that wanted to see The Best Christmas Pageant Ever with me.  Cassie and her crew came for a day from IN.  Emmy brought 'her kids' and her Trevor.  This made my heart burst with love and joy!  Best Day Ever!

This Thanksgiving was a little different.  We had a small crew and we had Mexican...all prepared by everyone but me.

The request for me to make Mamaw's traditional pineapple upside-down cake was all that I had to do.  Sarah even came to help clean.

Emmy and I have a tradition of hiking the day after Thanksgiving.  We started out at the Cincinnati Nature Center.  RRT had hidden 70 tokens along the trail.  We hiked for about 2 hours and found nothing.  I was okay with that.  It was glorious just to be outside!  Then we decided to go to Longbranch Farm to see if we could find any.  25 were hanging around out there.

We weren't on the trail for five minutes and Emmy found one.  Well, I was excited then.  We hiked and hiked some more.  I had a little kick in my step now and before I seemed to be dragging.  We took a turn that led us to a creek crossing and we decided to turn around and retrace our steps.  On the way back...

Emmy found another one but really in words didn't tell me but with her body language, I knew where to look.  So we were happy campers.

On our way back to the car we met a man and his sweet dogs and told him about finding tokens.  He had no idea what we were talking about but Emmy told him that if he stayed on the trail and looked to his left he would find one.  I think we saw a total of five but only took our two.

This year instead of giving away socks we got a scratch-off.

Emmy won the tumbler and I won a $10 gift card.  We were both excited!  Thanks, CNN and RRT for a fun morning!

FYI...we hiked over five miles!  Felt so good.  It really helped with the total of 'my AT thru-hike miles'.