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Feasting on a Full Thanksgiving Meal in the Middle of Nowhere

Can you have a full Thanksgiving meal in the middle of nowhere at a state or national park? We experiment for you and, turns out – yes you can!

Can you have a full Thanksgiving meal in the middle of nowhere at a state or national park? We experiment for you. And yes, as it turns out, you can!

Our middle of nowhere was Big Bend Ranch State Park, just down the road from Big Bend National Park. We finally worked up the guts to tell the grandparents that we wanted to travel for Thanksgiving week with friends. We didn’t want the usual extended family Thanksgiving where everyone gets stressed, eats too much, naps, and somehow the entire week the kids had off school disappears. That said, I was not willing to give up the big meal.

Thanksgiving food is non-negotiable for me. Sweet potatoes with too much brown sugar. The corn recipe my family stole from III Forks decades ago. My Mammer’s vintage broccoli rice casserole. And cranberry sauce from a can, because it feels wrong in theory but right on the plate.

The problem was logistics. How was I going to transport a fully cooked Thanksgiving meal in an already overstuffed Jeep and keep it cold for six days as we wandered through West Texas, the national park, Terlingua, and finally landed at a primitive campsite in the state park?

This is where I had to trust my husband. He insisted the best ice chest we owned was a smaller Yeti that basically doesn’t let anything melt as long as you don’t open it (much). He also has a plug-in freezer that connects to the Jeep, which meant we could keep ice packs frozen and rotate them without hunting for ice or dealing with soggy food. Our freezer brand is Alpicool: Car Fridge Freezer – Alpicool EU Store.

I pre-cooked everything and packed it into disposable aluminum pans with plastic lids. I did not want to haul home a bunch of dirty pans afterwards. I did the math and figured out that these perfectly fit into the Yeti with no room to slide around. I split each dish by using aluminum foil for makeshift dividers (also disposable!)

One pan held sweet potato casserole and mashed potatoes, since my husband and I strongly disagree on what the correct Thanksgiving potato dish is. Another had broccoli rice casserole and haricots verts, which is just green beans with a lot of lemon juice. A third held the creamed corn, plus smaller containers of gravy and canned cranberry sauce. We tossed in some vegetarian turkey and a friend brought a small pre-cooked turkey breast in her own ice chest.

Then came the pies. I somehow crammed two pies in there – one from H.E.B and one from Costco. Guess which one was so big that I literally had to fold it in half to make it fit. Have you ever folded a pie in half? It was messy, but it tasted the same.

Everything was frozen in my deep freezer at home for at least 24 hours before packing. I wanted everything nice and icy. The Yeti was filled completely with food, and then we layered the top with ice packs. It’s important to keep the ice packs on top so that they can be switched out without moving the food.

During the trip, we opened the cooler only when absolutely necessary. I think we swapped ice packs twice in five days. By the time Thanksgiving Day came, I was genuinely afraid I was about to give everyone food poisoning.

We cooked everything in stages on a propane double-burner stove, ate, waited, and no one got sick. In fact, some of the food was still slightly frozen when we opened the cooler. A few items shifted and mingled with neighboring dishes, but everything mostly held its shape and stayed fresh.

It was quite thrilling to eat a full Thanksgiving dinner at a primitive campsite, with no one around, and a wide open desert view. We followed dinner with a beautiful hike where we waded in the Rio Grande and climbed humongous Hoodoos. That might be the best post-Thanksgiving tradition we’ve ever had!

The biggest downside was cleanup. With no running water, it was rough. We used cleaning wipes to get the worst off, then bagged everything to wash properly once we were back in civilization. I don’t usually like generating a lot of trash on camping trips, but paper plates and disposable containers were completely worth it this time.

So, can you have a full Thanksgiving dinner in a state or national park, even after driving around with the food for five days? Yes. With a lot of planning and good gear, you might end up with one of the most memorable Thanksgiving meals of your life.