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June 12, 2009
Juniper Ridge visits Ashland
Amy, our graphic designer, and Hall took a road trip up to Portland, and we stopped for the night in jolly little Ashland ...
Drats, we got sucked into the Beaux Club vortex! The evening started out wholesome enough - we checked into the lovely and affordable Columbia Hotel (best inexpensive hotel, at around $80 per night, in the downtown area - check it out!), and had a great dinner at the strangely Mexican/Asian fusion themed restaurant Firefly - it sounds weird, but the food was great, not too expensive, and the restaurant had a nice cozy atmosphere. And that should have been it - we'd been driving all day, we were tired, we had a nice dinner and it was nine on a monday - we should have called it quits and headed back to the hotel, but noooooo the beaux club calls us, just one drink ... The ACDC was booming on the juke box, the Pabst Blue Ribbon turned into Tequila and Tonics, and before we knew it it was 2 in the morning and we were drunkenly sketching out our plans for our new Big Sur Sage Wildflower Tea with the bartender tapping her fingers and saying something about last call ...
Not content with our depravity, we smoked cigarettes and staggered around the deserted streets and wondered by this window advertising the local Shakespeare Festival and couldn't stop laughing ....
No offense to the high-culture thing Ashland has been cultivating for the past 30 years, and nothing against the Bard, after all I really dug the Shakespeare seminar I took in college, but who goes to these things? I don't know, it all smacks of self-congratulator pretentiousness - there's always a little too much chortling and self-satisfied laughter over jokes that aren't that funny to begin with and that I suspect few people even understand. I took a class on Shakespeare and unless I really bone up on Richard iii, I will barely be able to follow the plot let alone get the subtleties of the hunmor. C'mon, the reason there's so much overly-enthusiastic laughter is because everyone wants to prove to everyone else there that they're cultured and following all the subtleties of the play. Amy hilariously said that going to one of those plays was her idea of hell, and I think the poster kind of proves the point.
Here we are the next morning, oh my aching head! Nothing like a vigorous, wholesome hike to nurse a hangover, so I headed over to Lithia Park and hiked a couple of miles up Bear Creek.
We stopped into visit one of our favorite stores ont he West Coast, the fabulous Ashland Food Co-op.
Now it's time to hit the road, onto portland!
Posted by Hall in Juniper Ridge
