For Thanksgiving, PB and I traveled up to my brother’s house in New Jersey. Fun fact: PB grew up in the town my brother lives in, which is next to the town where we grew up. We managed to avoid traffic on our way up, and I am so not disclosing that strategy on the internet.

Anyway, our first day there, we went around visiting some of PB’s old haunts. He’s not been up that way in years, and I only have an emotional connection to the beach, so as long as we went there I didn’t care what else we did. (Seriously, I feel more at “home” when I go to Boston, even though when I lived in Massachusetts I lived on the other side of the state.)

We also played with my brother’s dog. A lot. He’s very cute. Even though he growled at me the first night I was there. By the fourth day, he’d figured out that the door to the bedroom we were sleeping in didn’t latch and my sister-in-law found him sitting in there, watching us sleep. (Which, come to think of it, would be creepy if he were a person, but is cute since he is a dog.)

Thanksgiving was delicious, and we had tons and tons of food. People always worry we’ll run out. We have never even come close. (Which reminds me, I still need the recipe for the sweet potato casserole from Goose.)

Friday we met up with some of his friends from high school. It’s always interesting to meet your SO’s old friends.

We headed back late Saturday. Along the way, we were pulled over. We were technically speeding, but so was everyone else, really. I mean, I had no idea why we were getting stopped. Had PB been driving much faster than everyone else on the road, I would have noticed. Anyway, this particular officer was a jackass. (Note: My dad was a police officer for 39 years. I tend to not judge them harshly at all.) He stood on my side of the car, blowing cigarette smoke into my window while asking tons of questions and telling us all of the tickets he could write us. At the end, he didn’t even go back to his car and run plate or driver’s license checks. Just told us he didn’t know why he was letting us go, but he figured we needed the money rather than paying it to the local government.

He then followed us to our exit to make sure we didn’t speed up.

The rest of the trip was uneventful, thankfully.