The Kalemba and Tanner families celebrate Thanksgiving like no other! This year was the "Oregon" Thanksgiving year, but rather than convene in La Grande, my parents mixed it up a bit and rented a house in Lincoln City.  Lee and I surprised my family with an early arrival on Tuesday and were so grateful to have arrived during day light.  As it was, the drive from Portland to Lincoln City was pretty miserable.  The rain came down in sheets and we may as well have been driving through a car wash on the freeway.  Roads were closed to fallen trees and we had to detour around the long way.  But, we made it and were happy to not have stuck with the original plan of a late night arrival.  It's been ages since we've arrived for Thanksgiving before midnight on Wednesday night, having nearly two full days before Thursday was awesome.  We got to be lazy and we made lots of pies!

By 1pm on Thanksgiving, everyone had trickled in and we tried to stick to some of our Thanksgiving traditions.  There weren't any hills to climb for our annual Thanksgiving Day walk, but we did go out in the wind and the rain for what ended up being a VERY brief walk on the beach.  It was rainy and super windy.  The wind nearly held you upright if you leaned into it.   We all wished we had goggles so we could actually open our eyes.   The highlight of the walk was the game of leap frog that ended up with my mom flattening Joy.  But after the two of them were soaked to the skin, we decided to turn around and walk (or fly with the wind) back.

Overall highlights of the weekend included:

• Collin and Patrick's attendance at their first Tanner/Kalemba TG
• Sterling joining us for the first time in ages
• The new games Collin and Ster brought to the table (Reverse Charades and Telephone Pictionary) and all the laughs that came with them.
• Hot turkey dinner at 5:30pm (and not 10pm). A significant improvement from last year!
• Still being able to bowl even in Lincoln City (although it was from the dark ages)

And the biggest disappointments were Kyle getting the stomach flu and spending 48 hours quarantined in the bedroom and my mom being down with a migraine and missing the bowling fun.

Of course no one wanted the weekend to end.  We always hate saying our goodbyes, so we decided to plan our next rendezvous - Ski Weekend in La Grande in February.  :)  It's always nice to have something to look forward to!