Fort Pierce, Florida - Thanksgiving Day

Thursday 11/23/2017 Thanksgiving Day
No Travel

I went to Publix yesterday intending to buy my favorite foods for a boat-made Thanksgiving Dinner. Perhaps I am crazy. Nancy and Mike from California Lady told me of a place here in Ft. Pierce where I could buy a carry-out Thanksgiving dinner with all the trimmings at a local catering facility. I opted to cook.

We had turkey, stuffing, mashed potatoes, gravy, yams (for me), brussel sprouts (for me), asparagus (for Clark), and cranberry jelly (for me). I have not had great success with the propane oven, so I came up with the idea of using my deep fryer as my cook pot. The Butterball had "slow cooker" instructions to add water then the bird, so I did that. Unfortunately, however, every half hour the water had cooked off and I had to add more. This was a very small, boneless turkey - like a turkey breast but with white and dark meat. Directions said cook time 2.5 hours, but at 2 hours I knew it was done. My experiment was a success as the turkey turned out juicy and flavorful.

Thanksgiving Dinner alfresco on Sunset Delight 

Sitting on the back deck with a cool breeze while enjoying home-cooked Thanksgiving dinner can't be beat. Too bad our family is so far away!

After dinner photo opportunity!
Remnants of meal still on the table.

After dinner, which we ate at 1:00, Clark dove into troubleshooting the GFI "tripping" problem we experienced at Marineland. As an afterthought as he climbed down into the battery compartment, he thought maybe he should have done this testing before he ate a huge dinner! Oh well - too late now!

Our customer service support person said the GFI tripping is a "known problem" for "our" boats and gave a suggestion related to the wiring of the dryer on board as to why the GFI may be tripping. Clark decided to do his own research before digging through the guest room closet to get to the back of the dryer to investigate the dryer wiring. He had a gut feel that the issue relates to the Inverter Charger.

Fortunately the power pedestal here at the Fort Pierce marina has a GFI outlet. Clark strung together power cord adapters to get power from the GFI outlet into the boat. As soon as he turned on power, it tripped. Good - problem reproduced on reduced scale. Next he reset the test and tried turning on power with the inverter charger turned off - no tripping of the GFI! Even turning the inverter charger on after power was connected did not trip the breaker, so he says, it is a sequencing problem. The good news here is he now has a workaround so next time they have only GFI, we should be good to connect as long as the inverter charger is off.

After Clark's success, we headed out to find a laundromat. I had enough laundry to warrant seeking something larger than the marina-offered equipment. The only reason I had a choice in the matter was because Nancy from California Lady insisted we use her personal car. She said her plans for the day were to kick back and relax.

Our timing for the laundromat could not have been better. The sky looked "sketchy", i.e. filling up with black clouds, but when we left, we had no rain. After we got to the laundromat and had our clothes in the washer, we had a rainstorm. By the time the clothes came out of the dryers, we had sunny skies for the rest of the day!  I thought perhaps that doing laundry on Thanksgiving might not be a popular choice. The only other people at the laundromat were two men whom I fully expect were bachelors - one in his 30s and one in his 80s (my guess). Otherwise, we had the place to ourselves.

While at the laundromat, my son, Chris, and I scheduled a FaceTime call for 6:00 via text messaging. Chris, his wife (Heather) and daughter (Lily) called us from Heather's parents house, so we got to talk to her parents as well as watch Lily run around trying to get into trouble (per usual). Delightful!

Growing up, my family always had sandwiches for supper on Thanksgiving Day made up from all the leftover turkey and trimmings. Clark's family had their own tradition for supper - pancakes. Clark and I adopted this as our tradition as well - my main reason for converting is that Clark cooks the pancakes.

Ready to start cooking!
I love my electric griddle - perfect for pancakes!

Clark gets artistic and romantic with his pancake designs!

I like mine plain, but Clark prefers blueberries in his!

I ate too much stuffing aka dressing at dinner time to eat any of the pumpkin pie I planned for dessert, so after our pancake supper, we had the pie! Hey - pumpkin is a vegetable, right?!

All told, it was a great and memorable day!