The Ride Home

Three days driving. Roughly six hours in the car each day. Not so bad.

We spent the first night in Ashland, Oregon. For years, Maxine's wanted to go to the Oregon Shakespeare Festival (http://www.osfashland.org/). I've never been entirely sure why. It always seemed to me that there were other venues, closer to home, where we could see Shakepeare performances. But, since it was on the way home...

Actually, the play was very well done. An outdoor theater with 1000 seats modeled on the Old Globe in England. (And, since we'd planned for a three day drive, Ashland actually is the logical first stop.) We saw Much Ado About Nothing. I hadn't seen it performed before, so I read the play during our last week in Portland (our landlords had a complete set of Shakespeare plays on their bookshelf, along with about 3000 other books.) The one truly amusing thing about the OSF is this. People in Oregon are so used to the idea of rain that the standard verbage in the play program says that if you decide within the first 1 hour 15 minutes of the play that the rain is too much for you, you can go to the box office for a credit against a future performance.

As we took our seats for the performance, the ushers were handing out wads of paper towels so we could wipe the rain off our seats from the afternoon. Then, just before the play started, someone from OSF staff came out and told us that the latest weather report showed clear air for the next couple hours. And, he was right. The air stayed clear and cold. We imagined we were in England watching the play.

Our next morning we reloaded the car (and dog). We drove to Northern California and spent a night with Maxine's sister. Originally we were planning two nights, but with Maxine's shoulder, we decided to press on to our house and our stuff so that she could recuperate more easily.

Saturday night, after having been gone for 5 1/2 weeks, we were home. We set Maxine up in a big pile of pillows so she could sleep better at nights. Opened up all the accumulated mail. Then, we started talking about all the differences between Portland and Los Angeles that we were noticing. Possibly source material for one last blog entry there...