We had no Thanksgiving plans, but luckily our small boat community had other ideas.

We were anticipating a quiet Thanksgiving, but then someone posted a flyer at the marina for a potluck Thanksgiving dinner, so I made my third round of crockpot mashed potatoes. The host made enough food to feed an army, and then only a handful of people showed up. The food was absolutely amazing though, and we met a few of the liveaboards at the marina. We had a pretty good time, but…cruiser conversation. There’s only so much boat talk I can handle, especially in a group of people who have Very Strong Opinions. If you’ve got a genuine problem, let’s talk it out and see if we can come up with a solution! But if you’re telling me I absolutely must spend thousands of dollars on lighting because the lights come with a 7-year warranty! well I can already see we’re going to try to keep this conversation very short.

We had a successful Black Friday mission in terms of the drill set Kyle wanted, but we stopped at Best Buy for a 4TB hard drive and they were sold out already. At least we didn’t have to fight the throng of people trying to finance TVs the size of projector screens.

After shopping, we went to the aquarium, since we have passes to get in for free but we haven’t gone in a long time. Normally when we go on the weekends we have to navigate a mass of strollers, so I was extremely pleased to find it was a pretty quiet day. Then a bunch of amazing things happened:

• The aquarium has always had a petting tank for the rays, but they started a new program where you can feed the rays, which means that even if you don’t have food in your hands the rays are almost aggressively friendly – they used to be far more skittish.
• They opened a new exhibit on their turtle rehabilitation and it’s amazing. There were a couple loggerheads drifting around in the tanks and I am sure I squealed like a six-year-old when I saw them.
• We were just in time for the otter feeding, which means the otters were going crazy, they looked like they were having a blast with their underwater gymnastics. They are so adorable!
• They also put on a show in the big tank, today’s diver was dressed as an elf and teaching kids about marine animals.
• While wandering near the big tank, Caretta (the loggerhead turtle that lives at the aquarium) swam right up to the window we were at and stayed there. She is normally very hard to find, I’ve never seen her up close like that.

By the time we left the aquarium, the sun was out and we’ve been enjoying a beautiful afternoon ever since.