WEST WARWICK, R.I.

Taking to the road over Thanksgiving is an American tradition, and AAA projects that a record 71.1 million Americans will drive to their dinner destination.

My husband and I will join the driving throngs. But our Thanksgiving tradition is to set out for no particular dinner destination and with no expectations. Over the years, we have had the best of dines and the worst of dines at restaurants where we have just walked in.

The Ram’s Head Tavern, in Annapolis, Md., is at the top of our Thanksgiving spins chart.

One year, as walk-ins, we enjoyed the tavern’s clubby conviviality and its Chesapeake Bay seafood-laden Thanksgiving menu, which included oyster stew and oyster stuffing. I share H.L. Mencken’s passion for large Maryland oysters, which he described as "magnificent, matchless reptiles" and a "thing of prolonged and kaleidoscopic flavors.”

Another Thanksgiving spin, in my husband’s Cessna 182RG, to Tangier Island, we rank at the bottom of our holiday dinners, mostly because no dining happened.

We flew from Dulles International Airport, in northern Virginia, to the island in the Chesapeake Bay, off the coast of Virginia, with a friend of ours who is also a pilot. Mike was always up for a flying adventure. To our knowledge, he had no reverence for food — it was just fuel, like Avgas for a plane.

It was my first trip to Tangier Island. I had read that some of the 600 inhabitants of the island spoke with the Elizabethan accent of its founders. We didn’t encounter any of them or, for that matter, anyone.

After we landed at the airport, which seemed to be unattended, we started walking to the town center.

Along the way, we passed a house surrounded with a chain-link fence. A Siberian Husky stood in the front yard. My husband and I owned one — he was a friendly fellow, a breed trait.

He called to the husky and put his fingers through the fence to pet him. The brute nearly made a Thanksgiving dinner of them.

When we reached the town, none of the restaurants were open; so no Maryland crab soup, no crab cakes, called “world famous” on Chesapeake Bay restaurant menus.

On our walk back to the airport, I grabbed a few crab recipes, printed on small squares of paper, which are left in boxes in front of some houses. One of them, “Daddy’s Crab Salad,” has an intriguing endnote: “The secret of this recipe is not what’s not in it. Let the crabmeat be the main ingredient.”

We flew to Washington National Airport, not because our stomachs were empty but because we were nearly out of fuel. The pumps at the island’s airport were on holiday, too.

We filled the plane’s two tanks at National and flew to Dulles, the plane’s base. Then we drove home, wondering if we had enough milk in the refrigerator for a bowl of cereal dinner.

Our neighbors saw us pull into our driveway and called to see if we wanted some pie. Did we ever! We ate all kinds of pies for dinner, and we gave thanks for all the good, sweet things and the family love that went into making them.

Linda Gasparello is producer of White House Chronicle, on PBS. Her email is lgasparello@kingpublishing.com and she’s based in Rhode Island.

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