Our second day in Ashland began with a trip to the dog park for Edie. Unfortunately, no other dogs were around yet so we looked about and strolled back to the Blue Moon Bed and Breakfast. Edie had her usual kibble while John and I enjoyed a really tasty little cheese souffle. We had some interesting company at the table. Most were members of one family who had gathered in Ashland from different parts of Oregon and California. There were two clergymen, one Episcopal and the other Methodist, and a several teachers. I think the priest was a professor at Oregon State. Anyhow, it was a group where you could be certain that nobody had ever voted for George Bush or supported the Iraq war for evening a nanosecond.
We had nothing planned until The Tempest that evening. John looked in our dog hikes in Oregon book and found one that seemed good to him. It was a hike around some lake a little south of Jacksonville. So we set off in the car. We stopped for a bit in Jacksonville. When I saw the town I remembered that Ellen and I had come here with Naida one day while John was taking classes. It seemed a little bigger than I remembered it, and more conservative, too. I saw a couple of those "This car will be unmanned in case of Rapture" and when we asked the lady at the visitor center if there was a bookstore in town we were directed to "Discount Christian Books." Now there's the Republicans for you: not just tacky religion, but tacky religion on the cheap.
The lake hike was a bit of a disappointment. First of all, we should have realized that in this area any large body of water is likely to be a reservoir, and these are just not as attractive as real lake. We strolled around for a bit, and John and Edie got wet. We got turned around at one point, and John, who really wasn't wearing the best shoes for this kind of hiking, just announced that he'd had enough. We hadn't done much of the trail, but frankly it did not seem all that wonderful so I did not protest that I wanted to stay and do all three hours of it.
We tried to look for the book John had lost at a bookstore in Ashland. Much of the main part of town had been shut down and cordoned off by the police, and this made traffic incredibly slow and parking a bit challenging. We learned later that it was because a phony bomb had been left by the statue of Abraham Lincoln. It had a note connected to it saying that it was a fake, but the police called in the bomb squad as usual. We didn't find the book John wanted, but ended up buying a couple others instead.
John took Edie and me back to the room, and he went off to the grocery store to get stuff for an early dinner. All three of us ate and took naps, and we went off to see the play.
It was a traditional presentation of The Tempest, but quite well-done. The actor who did Prospero was particularly good. One of the problems with the play is that there's so much exposition about the events which happened in Milan and Naples and then all the stuff with the shipwreck. I've seen this part handled a little more creatively than they did in Ashland, but once Act I is over it picks up a bit. They did a Cirque du Soleil style act with acrobats on ropes for the illusion that Prospero creates for Miranda and Ferdinand -- that could have been cheesy but worked well.
