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August 26, 2004

Oregon Trip

Went last week again to the Oregon Shakespeare Festival in Ashland, Oregon with time also in Portland. The plays we saw were The Royal Family by George S. Kaufman and Edna Ferber and, by Shakespeare, King Lear, Much Ado about Nothing, Comedy of Errors, and Henry VI Parts I, II and III (as two plays). All the plays were wonderfully done but King Lear was definitely my favorite as the overall acting, set and costumes were all wonderful and it is simply an amazingly good play. Oddly enough, I liked it the most despite a couple of flaws including that Lear's Fool was played by the understudy (due to some kind of emergency for the regular Fool) and he was actually reading his lines onstage at times from a held script which certainly took one out of the scene to a significant degree.

Other highlights of the trip were a visit to the Portland Rose Garden and the absolutely wonderful and gorgeous Portland Japanese Garden which I was completely blown away by the beauty, serenity and craftsmanship of. On an opposite note, the ride down the Rogue River on a 40MPH Jetboat out of Grant's Pass was really exciting and fun. A final highlight was the excellent food, ambience, and service at the Chateaulin restaurant in Ashland. I have now eaten their twice and both meals number among my best 25 or so in my life probably.

A minor lowlight was our trip to Klamath Falls when we came unbelievably close to running out of gas (and had to beg a tiny bit of gas to make the last 9 miles to a station) and then had a one minute trip in a canoe before we returned to the dock as we were sure we were going to capsize if we continued. I think this later incident was mainly the fault of the very tippy canoe but was annoying.

Thanks to Katharina for her wonderful hospitality to us.

Posted by aarondf at August 26, 2004 04:00 PM

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