​A few will admire me, but more will detest my behavior, either because they actually love the holiday, or are too chickenshit to do what I did.

This year, after decades of suffering dry-breasted turkeys, inane "catch-up" conversations with people I barely know, and hours of waiting for totally predictable and mainly mediocre food, I decided to remove myself from the Thanksgiving pool, and get as far away from the holiday as possible.

​But where to go? Clearly, the most effective remedy was to leave the country entirely, but I didn't want to be gone for days, and I certainly didn't want to go near an airport around Thanksgiving time. I didn't want to pay inflated prices for a rental car, only to find myself trapped in an endless traffic jam. Accordingly, I whipped out my regional map and scanned it for remote but spectacular areas I could reach by public transportation.

​My eye lit on Montauk, which I knew to be at the rocky, dune-y, and scrub-infested end of the earth. I'd never been there before, and this was the extreme off-season. I also knew lots of fish mongers from the farmers market lived in Montauk, which suggested it might not be as snobby and high-end as the stuffed-shirt Hamptons. In fact, I expected some slums.

Going to the end of the earth, at least metaphorically, would make my friend and I feel like 16th-century explorers, and I knew there was a spectacular lighthouse on a rocky promontory at New York's easternmost point.