A decade ago, none of our college-aged sons and daughter were in Minnesota, and two of the three were in New England.  Either my wife or I came up with the idea of reserving a Residence Inn suite in Cambridge that we had visited several times before when college-hunting, and preparing a full Thanksgiving dinner there, after detours to pick up our daughter and one of our sons from their colleges, and hitting a grocery store en route.  We discovered – before making our reservations – that very few Residence Inn kitchens have ovens large enough to cook a turkey, so we made sure our room was one of those.  However, after arriving I made a nearly deadly error; I left the once-frozen turkey in the grocery bag on the kitchen floor instead of putting it in the freezer. This was not discovered until Thanksgiving morning. Making matters worse, Massachusetts has a longstanding “blue law” which forbids grocery stores from being open on Thanksgiving, so the typical Minnesota solution (a run to Cub Foods) was not available to us.  So we postponed everything a day, spending Thanksgiving dinner at a local hotel’s restaurant that we always admired from afar, then getting up on Black Friday to look for a new frozen turkey rather than a hot deal on an appliance (like the others). There were surprisingly few available but we found one, and completed the rest of the operation.