The NEW New Yorker Blog

I celebrated my first ever Thanksgiving holiday (Thursday 23rd November) with an inaugural trip to the Hamptons with my new friends, L, H and T – collectively known as The Brit Girls! Roadtrip – yay!

Americans love the Thanksgiving holiday. It marks the start of the holiday season and is a time for family and friends to come together over a turkey dinner – of course – to give thanks for all their blessings and appreciate each other. Whilst people do go a little crazy preparing all the various traditional dishes that make up Thanksgiving Dinner, lots of Americans I spoke to say they much prefer Thanksgiving to Christmas because it feels more authentic – there’s no over the top gift giving or present wrapping stress, just time to be with your loved ones.

I met The Brit Girls quite soon after I arrived in NYC this summer. H had just started a Meet Up group (Brit Girls in Manhattan) to try to meet new friends, luckily I decided to give it a go and signed up for the first event, a Mexican brunch – which has been a consistent theme in our subsequent gatherings! I’d never used the Meet Up app before but had been told it was a good way to meet people in NYC. And for me it certainly was! H and L were at that first brunch and we clicked right away. T joined our second event a couple of weeks later and before we knew it, we suddenly had our very own modern take on Sex and The City – four single ladies, new in the city and looking to have fun! So to cut a long story short, they kinda are my loved ones in NYC!

And as such, we had to spend Thanksgiving together and thought it was the perfect opportunity to get out of the city for a couple of days (as most people here take the Friday off too and have a long weekend). So we decided to rent a car and find an Air Bnb out towards the Hamptons!

After a couple of hours driving east out of NYC and stopping for brunch (obviously!) en route we eventually arrived at our cute Air Bnb home (sadly not the only below – can you believe I didn’t take a picture of the front of our house?!) in a little town called Jamesport on Long Island. It was picturesque!

We completely lucked out with the weather as well! It was mild and crisp with clear blue skies and plenty of sunshine every day we were there – we were definitely thankful for that!

Our house had an outside deck that led down towards a good sized garden complete with its own firepit.

Perfect for wrapping up and enjoying the streaming sunshine with some drinks. If only we’d have thought to bring some mulled wine!

And to top it off, our house was only a short drive down to the beach. The lifestyle seems great out there, much more relaxed and slower paced than the city. Everyone seems to know their neighbours and there’s a real sense of community.

Life out in the Hamptons is also very much geared towards the outdoors – think beaches, sailing and vineyards. Honestly what’s not to like?! The Hamptons are most famous for people leaving the city in their droves during the summer to come to their Hamptons beach house for the weekend. But I have to say I loved it during the off season. Take a look at this beautiful, deserted beach we found….

It was stunning and personally, I love walking down an empty beach when its cold out! It’s so peaceful! Well, until we got there, that is!

Just at the end of our road we found a beautiful little body of water and as the sun was setting, it made for such a gorgeous photo. There wasn’t a soul in sight and everything was so still.

We just couldn’t resist hopping into this moored up boat to take a cheeky photo! I hope the owners didn’t mind!

And of course that turned into a mini photo call!

Well maybe more than a mini photo call…..

Let’s just say we were there for a while…….!

After a bracing walk and some games played back at our Air Bnb, we started to get ready for Thanksgiving Dinner! As we didn’t have much time on our trip, although cooking would have been fun, we wanted to explore the area a bit and so we booked dinner out in Southampton at 75 Main. It was so much fun getting ready together at the house and glamming up!

After a 30 minute Uber ride – the poor guy must’ve hated us, there was a LOT of singing going on – we arrived in Southampton, the cutest little town.

How cute is it?!

Dinner was lovely and included a slightly tipsy and very lengthy Thanksgiving toast given by moi – which unfortunately H filmed, much to my amusement the next morning! Like proper Americans we all shared what we were thankful for this year.

The night ended back at the local bar in Jamesport where, let’s just say, we made both friends and enemies with several of the locals!

The next day we ventured out a bit further from Jamesport and explored the town of Matituck. It’s super quaint and there was one tree-lined street in particular that had beautiful shops a plenty and was called, Love Lane!

I loved this beautiful church which stood at the end of Love Lane.

On our last day and on our way back into the city, we stopped at one of many vineyards in the area. Our pick was Duck Walk Vineyard but there are so many to choose from all along the North Fork.

It was a perfect end to a fabulous couple of days – sipping wine in the afternoon sun with friends. And a few photos of course! This is one of my favourites!

All in all, a fabulous way to experience my first Thanksgiving holiday! And so grateful to have found such a fun, crazy and adventurous group of friends to experience it with me! Thanks for an awesome weekend girls!

Xoxo