A Thanksgiving in Cambria

I traveled to Cambria, California with my family this past week for our Thanksgiving celebration.  It is tradition that we all meet up at my grandparents’ cabin each year.  Although this year’s gathering was small, it was a nice quiet weekend together that I know we all enjoyed.

My Mom cooked all of the food with a bit of help from my sister and I.  Our sponsored turkey “Martha” made an appearance on the table (as a guest!), and my tofurky was actually pretty good this year.  We also had some wine from the winery J works at, Carr, which is located here in Santa Barbara.  And lettuce from my garden! Sadly, all my other vegetables are behind schedule, but we did get a nice salad.

To decorate the table, I gathered some pinecones, branches, and logs from the neighborhood and we all brought up our fall pumpkins for one last showing.  My sister, M, did the final table styling as well as take all the pictures in this post.  She also wrote out our personalized placemats.  The dishes are my grandmas, she inherited most of them from her mom, they are “Autumn Leaf” by Jewel T- pretty fitting for Thanksgiving!

And no trip to Cambria is complete without a visit to see the Elephant Seals. The Northern Elephant seals come ashore here just north of San Simeon to molt, have babies, and at this time of year- fight! We headed up after our Thanksgiving food comas and ended up seeing a beautiful sunset.

Cambria was a nice break from the craziness that is school right now. We are already heading into finals! This first quarter of grad school has gone by so fast- it seems like each week just flies by. I don’t think I have ever learned so much or worked so hard in school!