Thanksgiving 2016

This year the Choose Adventure crew decided to take REI's #OptOutside one step further and actually celebrate our Thanksgiving in the beautiful Anza Borrego Desert State Park.  It's been a couple of years since we've enjoyed the Blair Valley/Little Blair Valley area, so we loaded up the van for a single over-nighter - just 26 hours of adventure, but it was great!

Normally, our meals while camping are tasty and filling, but a little simplified.  For Thanksgiving, though, we had to go all-out.  I started three days in advance, brining a turkey breast and thigh (only two of us eat meat, after all) using a sous vide recipe from Michael Voltaggio.  Pre-cooking then chilling the bird meant that I only needed to sear it off in camp to re-warm and crisp up the skin.  Very convenient!  I used my small dutch oven over coals to bake orange marmalade and brown sugar-glazed baby carrots and haricot vert grean beans in butter (wrapped in foil).  Add in a wonderful recipe Kimberley found for Port-Wine Cranberry sauce, traditional mashed potatoes, and spätzle fried with onions and butter, and we ate like the glampers we've always been accused of being.  Hey, I didn't get fat by accident.  To top it off, we dug out a wonderful bottle of Almanac Farmer's Reserve Grand Cru, a super tasty sour beer we've been saving for a special occasion, and this was it, for sure!

Meal prep was made a bit more challenging by the visitation of quite a few bees (I knew the food smelled good!), hence the screen room you'll see deployed in the video.  Aside from that, the only "negative" for the night was that it was c'c'-c'-cooooold.  Weather.com had promised a low of about 46°F, but I think that the nominal weather station is at the visitor's center in Borrego Springs which is probably 14+ miles and several canyons away, not to mention 2000' lower.  The water I left out didn't freeze, but I think mid-30's Fahrenheit is a safe guess.  Fortunately, Annika normally sleeps with an extra fleece liner in her bag, so she was cozy.  Kimberley and I may need the same if we're going to continue enjoying fall at these elevations.  (Or I need to hurry up and install a heater!)

We've been continually inspired by the fantastic video work being done by Jed and the team at CampervanCulture.com.  In particular, their recent six-part Arctic Circle Overland series has been a big leap forward in production value, and more importantly has got Annika excited about traveling to Scandinavia, and has really pushed me to try to up our game when it comes to the quality and frequency of the travel videos we can make.  For this trip I shot two sets of long-run timelaps series, and I'm re-acquainting myself withe the form after some early experiments.

Remembering that our first "adventure video" was one of Google's "auto awesome" videos created by an algorithm grabbing snippets from my cloud-based photo storage, we've come quite a ways.  I hope we can continue to do more, both to better document how beautiful the places we visit can be, but also to help inspire still more people to get out and take advantage of the outdoors.  Any family members feeling supportive can find that I've added a DJI Phantom 3 photography drone to my Amazon wish list! ;-)  Until then, creativity will suffice.

Enjoy the video and here's hoping that you and your family choose to #OptOutside next year!