Less than two weeks ago, the four-month intensity that included planning, the actual vacation, and the subsequent 60 days of writing created a situation where I was not ready to jump back into traveling. This is only the third or fourth time in the past nearly 25 years that we’ve been in Phoenix for Thanksgiving, and in celebration of that, we spared no expense and went all out. Yep, we skipped the Chinese restaurant and made dinner at home after buying a box of gravy, a box of stuffing, and a tub of cranberry sauce from Costco, rounding it out with a vegan Field Roast from Whole Foods.

As for fresh food? We passed on that because that’s just too much work when trying to capture laziness, which we did perfectly. Was the dinner ideal? On one hand, of course, it was, as it appealed to our sense of doing as little as possible, and like the year we tried Tofurkey or the Cajun Turducken, it was something out of the ordinary.

Also out of the ordinary, by foregoing our almost ritualistic Thanksgiving visits to the Oregon coast, we’ll have ended up not visiting the Pacific Ocean even once during 2023, the first time since 1995 that we didn’t gaze upon that vast body of blue-green water at least once over the course of a year. Noting this, I’m opening my 2024 travel itinerary and penciling in a reminder to visit the western coast of the U.S. next year.