The first few years I live d in San Diego, I ended up spending Thanksgiving camping in Baja with a group of graduate students who, like me, were too poor to make it home for both Thanksgiving and Christmas.  The tradition fell off though as the main people involved in the planning finished their degrees and moved on.  So for the past two years, I spent a quiet Thanksgiving holiday with friends in San Diego.

However, this year I jumped at the chance to spend a few days out in nature.  E and I had been talking about doing a weekend camping trip sometime in the beginning of November, and one morning as we were discussing it, I said, “Wait!  Why don’t we take the few days over Thanksgiving and go somewhere a little further than Joshua Tree?”  He looked at me like I was a genius, and then we decided Big Sur was the place to go.

Knowing how crazy Los Angeles traffic gets, especially around the holidays, we elected to leave San Diego at 4AM Thanksgiving morning.  Yes, you read that correctly.  We didn’t exactly get to bed early either, so we switched off driving and napping duties along the way.  We made it to our campsite around noon, after taking several breaks to gawk at the coastline views.  Can you blame us?

This was our lunch stop, near Hearst Castle.

Further on down the road.

Once we got to the campsite, it felt a little bit like fall. Slightly chilly, but gotta love leaves like this!

The boy, being a goof.

Of course, when we got to Fernwood Resort and set up our tent, we snoozed for a few hours. Did I mention that we were able to set up our tent on the sand by a river? Sooo comfortable. The rest of the evening was spent cooking turkey burgers (with stuffing as a topping!) and marshmallows over the fire. Mmmmm, I miss it. Check out the rest of the photos below (click to get larger versions, and again on the photo to go through to the Flickr page):

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