Off to home after a visit with old friends

It’s an easy five hour drive to Sacramento, but finding our motel near the UC campus in Davis was not difficult, nor was the late afternoon traffic heavy.  We got in touch with old friends and headed into Sacramento for dinner with them.  It was a fine dine at Waterboy, with much good conversation of friends who have not seen each other in many years.   The wine, a Revolution sangiovesi Renzo Gandyhill Winery in Sacramento County was a lovely vino locali.   It went well with John’s white anchovies and then his skirt steak and Ben’s lobster and corn cream soup, followed by scallops.   Then a quick return to UC in Davis and today we head off to the airport to return to Washington.  

A grand finale of O’Neill and Loesser

We finished off our time in Ashland with two masterpieces.  First, in the afternoon, we sat entranced through an outstanding production of Long Day’s Journey into Night by Eugene O’Neill.  Just a grand performance by outstanding actors.  It wasn’t the first time we had seen it, but it was the best—and it entranced our hosts who had not seen it before.  It’s long (3:45) and can be quite depressing if you let it, but it gets so much to heart of dysfunctional family issues.

The second piece was Frank Loesser’s gem of a musical, Guys and Dolls.   It doesn’t date, even though it was written over 60 years ago.  This production had strong performances for Sky Masterson and Miss Adelaide in particular.  The song and dance numbers were superb.  Take Back Your Mink beautifully done by a zaftig group of 1950s “dolls” in their frilly lacy undies. 

This was the first time OSF has had an Out weekend, too.  The rainbow flag flew proudly over the theater. 

We dined at an Italian restaurant, Pasta Piatta, where the portions were just huge.  We had one superb wine from winery we had never heard of, Ledger David Epitome of Three—a mixture of reds, and another, a syrah, from Jacksonville’s Quady Winery, which disappointed us.  During the evening we were treated to a deluge from a highly irregular thunderstorm at this time of year;  it broke the heat wave.

This morning we said our goodbyes till next year and drove to Sacramento where we will visit with friends this evening before returning home tomorrow.   Our trip today took us by the monumental Mt. Shasta at 14,100 feet (425 meters) and a visit to the oldest fish hatchery west of the Mississippi!

Sixteenth and Nineteenth Century Women and more...

Ashland Street
musician:
Hurdy-Gurdy Player

Yesterday was another all-day theater day.  We attended two productions:   Much Ado about Nothing in the afternoon and Fingersmith in the evening.   Both were superb.

Much Ado about Nothing was a wonderful comedy, done very well, with excellent renditions of Benedict and Beatrice, and good performances by the rest of the cast.   The report we heard was that the cast was a bit overwhelmed with how active the audience was and it threw them off a bit.   Since the audience is very close to the stage action (and some of the actors climb down into the audience), we could see how this could happen.  It was a hilarious performance.  The movement, acrobatics and site gags put it over-the-top.

The second play of the day was Fingersmith, based on a novel by Sarah Waters.  This world premiere is a wonderful Victorian piece, a pot boiler of a mystery, which should move across the country and be played in many different places.  Besides being emotionally disturbing in its treatment of women in the 19th century, it has a macabre Dickensian appeal that we won’t tell you about.  Just to say that if you get a chance to see this play, see it.

We attended a talk with the writer of the adaptation, Alexa Junge, and a dramaturge, Susan Lyons, about the production and how it was written for the stage from the 500 page novel Waters had completed about twenty years ago.  It brought out many things in the play, without divulging the plot.

We had dinner with friends of Jane and Peter who live in and around Ashland at Amuse, where we had eaten last year. The friends were truly a blend:  two South Africans whom they had known for years at Stanford, who had left  SA during the apartheid years, and a retired American emergency physician and his Australian wife, who now run their own vineyard to keep themselves in wine!  Both couples now live in Ashland.  

John and Ben both had the excellent three mushroom salad, which Ben followed with Alaskan halibut and John had sweetbreads with cherries.  We completed the meal with Amuse’s famous beignets, which must be ordered early in the meal.   We tasted three wines, a sauvignon blanc from Kriselle, a pinot noir from Irvine Winery, and a superb marsanne-roussanne-viognier mix from Cowhorn called Spiral 36.

We decided this morning not to stick around Ashland for the Fourth of July Parade and headed off to Applegate Valley to Cowhorn Vineyards to taste their wine—and visit the old Gold Rush town of Jacksonville, now a National Historic District.  

1850s Buildings Jacksonville

Jacksonville 19th century railroad
train, made in Pittsburgh!

The town is full of old 19th century buildings, some of which have been closed up and left in their original state to become 21st century museum pieces.  We took the town’s trolley tour to see this little place, with its 3000 inhabitants (it was bigger than that in the 19th century) and thoroughly enjoyed it. On it, we saw the old train that ran to Medford:  the 1891 engine was made in Pittsburgh.  There are still tracks in some of the streets where it ran. 

Cowhorn is a eco-winery and we tasted four of their wines: the Spiral 36 we had had last night, a marsanne-roussanne mix that was much dryer, a syrah, very full and very lovely, and a grenache, which we enjoyed immensely.  

Applegate Valley 

John is bringing back the printed information he could find about Rogue Valley and nearby wineries for our book collection.  The wines here are really good—as we said last year.

Dinner in nearby Talent was at the New Sammy’s Cowboy Bistro about three miles from Ashland.  It’s a sprawling part French-style and part Santa Fe-stucco style restaurant.

This is a place where the family had been the owner of a place Jane and Peter had visited in Mendocino a few years ago.  This version is owned by the family patriarch’s son, with dad in an assisting role as keeper of the wine cellar.  Regrettably the cellar had only one wine from the Rogue or nearby valleys…and we had had it both tasting at the winery and at dinner the previous evening!

The food and wine were good with a few mis-steps.   We ordered a lovely white wine, unknown to us, to go with dinner.  It was a savignan white from the Jura mountains in the east of France (although the dad described it as a Loire valley wine).   We had heard of yellow Jura wines, but not this white, which turned out to be quite full-bodied and good choice for most of the dishes we had.

Ben had a salmon dish, which was good and John enjoyed braised beef spare-ribs. The leek appetizer was good, but the leeks were not softened enough to slice easily.  Claire ordered a tortellini dish, which turned out to not be available about 10 minutes into the wait period for the food.  She enjoyed the risotto substitute, but this should not have happened.   We enjoyed both a floating island and an intricate ice cream dish for dessert and finished up the dinner as the last guests at 10PM.

We had a pleasant close to the evening sitting on the Winchester Inn’s grounds watching the Ashland 4 July fireworks through the trees.

Egypt and China

Yesterday, July 2, was a theater day.  We attended two performances, both of them superb in very different ways.   The two plays were Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra and a production written by a major modern Chinese playwright, Secret Love in Peach Blossom Land.

Antony and Cleopatra was grand!   The production, outside in the huge Allen Elizabethan Theater took no liberties with the script, followed along with what you would expect of a major Shakespeare play and was perhaps the best version we have ever seen.   The acting was magnificent, the set inventive, and the costuming completely fitting to the tragedy.   It’s a must.  We are not generally given to standing ovations but this play got one.   

The other play, by Stan Lai, having its US premiere, is a strange combination of two plays into one:  One is a 4th Century AD Chinese play, the other a play set in modern Taiwan as Mainland China opened in the 1980s for a dying man who was in love with a woman in 1948 in Shanghai, and separated by the Maoist Revolution.  In this play, the two plays are scheduled for rehearsals in the same theater on one night and interact with each other, at one point with both rehearsals being played out at the same time.   While the production is confusing in the beginning, the way it works out with the two plays actually completing their scripts separately at the end of the evening is comedic and tragic at the same time.  The after-play discussion featured Leah Anderson who played Blossom.  Ms. Anderson is the daughter of an Asian father and a Caucasian mother who grew up with her mother in Los Angeles and went to Yale to study political science.  After considering law school, she decided to follow her passion and went to Brown for an MFA in drama.  The discussion included a good bit about race which, of course is on everybody’s mind these days. Apparently, race played a major role in the workshop discussions as well as the translation of this play.  Ms Anderson, given her mixed-race status was seminal in these discussions.  Apparently she is also a playwright.  She plays Hero in Much Ado About Nothing which we will see this afternoon.      

We had dinner at Larks Hotel restaurant in the center of Ashland, with a lovely Umpqua Valley Abacela albariño white (very dry) to go with Ben’s lingcod (a Pacific Ocean fish) on kale and lentils and John’s meat loaf.  It’s an “American” restaurant, aiming to do down-home cooking.  Other members of the group had Southern fried chicken.  Ben started with sautéed brussels sprouts with bacon and nuts, while John had an arugula salad with pickled radishes and toasted cashews.  While Ben really enjoyed his cod, John thinks his own meat loaf is better.

Hot Lowlands, Cool Altitudes, Fine Theater

Yesterday, July 1, was one of those great days with a full schedule of fascinating experiences  from a national park to superb theater. It was also a day to learn from very strong experience that attitude affects outside temperatures.

We left Chico early, about 7 AM, heading to Lassen Volcanic National Park.  It’s about two hours, mostly heading up to higher altitudes.   Already on our departure the heat was well over 80F (27C), and the air conditioning in our car was going full blast.  The first sign that we were heading into different territory from the populated centers of the valley along the Sacramento River was a sign saying “No Fuel Next 62 Miles.”   We rose through the burned out plains with their California oak trees, into canyon country.  Deep tranches through the earth with multicolored strata showed how the layers had settled.   Then the pine forests began with the rushing streams, still with water in them from the Sierra.  The road twisted and turned, rose up and down through the mountains and caused us to slow down from the legal 55 mph speed limit to about 25 mph for some of the bendy turns.  By then we could open the windows to the temperatures in the 60sF/18C.

We arrived at the Lassen Volcanic National Park about 8:55, needing to wait five minutes for the Visitor Center to open.   A 20 minute video, that was very good, tuned us in to what we were going to see—four different types of volcanoes, in the only place in the world where they are all within the boundaries of a national park.   Cinder Cones, plug domes like Mt Lassen,  ones, worn down ones, known as erosional, and shield volcanoes. (John forgets the scientific names).   Mt. Lassen last blew its top exactly 100 years ago so you can see lava flows everywhere, cooled off, mostly.  But in some places there are still crusts with hot water flowing beneath them gurgling to the surface, so you are not allowed to hike near them.  Lassen is a magnificent park and had very few visitors, though we did have a car in front of us with a couple of cigar smokers—John hated the smell.

At one point it was so brisk and cold that we needed to close the windows of the car.   At 8511 feet  (nearly 2600 meters) we felt our ears pop and even had slight headaches from the altitude.  But it sure was cool.

From Lassen we found our requisite coffees at the Higher Ground Café in a village (really a wide spot on the road) called Shingletown, about 30 miles outside Redding.  The baristas had a great time making Ben’s concoction.  We decided the artwork in the foam was of a Mt. Lassen eruption.

Mt Shasta is down there somewhere

A stop for lunch north of Redding led us to picnic on the banks of the Shasta Lake Reservoir.  With the drought the water levels are so low that it is impossible to see the water from picnic tables on the I-5, merely seeing dried sandy banks which would normally be full.   The birds, crested blue jays, make a cawing noise, even worse than their East Coast brethren, but they went after the remnants of the Indian food we had had the night previous and offered to them.   A strong sign recommended against children heading toward a fence, with the threat of rattlers in the area.

All the time during this trip below 3000 feet (1000 meters) the weather was so hot we had the strongest blast from the car a/c going.   It was 105F/41C when we reached Ashland.   

Ashland, though, is as lovely as ever, even in the heat and we sat under shade trees to talk about the last year since we had seen Jane and Pater.   With lots and lots of iced water.

Dinner at the Peerless Hotel, unlike last year, was inside.   John enjoyed his sampler of dishes with lamb meatballs, while Ben enjoyed a Romesco soup of the day with ahi poke small plate, and a lobster fennel salad.  The wine was a Plaisanace Ranch Vineyard Appletree Valley Viognier, which was surprisingly good.  (Ben loves viognier, while John has not found it to his  taste till now.)

Then it was off to the theater:   Dumas’ Count of Monte Cristo, outside in 90F/32C heat in the Elizabethan Theater.  The production was quite a soap opera, melodramatic, and lots of fun.    In effect the director had made it quite farcical, quite unlike the book.  We enjoyed it for the acting and theatrics as much as for the plot, which lacked the depth of the original Dumas novel according to Claire, one of our group.  Anne, another member, and John agreed it had a hilarity about it that Dumas probably had never thought.

Off to Ashland through rural California

En route to Ashland, Oregon’s Shakespeare Festival,  Tuesday, June 30

This will be our second visit to Ashland for a long weekend of plays.  We’re to see seven plays in four days while we are in Oregon.  Surprisingly we’ve found it isn’t theater overload. We enjoy the plays and our hosts, Jane and Peter from the Bay Area, as well as their other friends here for the shows.  A good few days together.

We are coming off a few very busy days in Washington with company from England and Australia, before that a fortnight in New England.  Then  off to the airport this morning.  We can say it’s been fun, and tiring, but not exhausting.

As we write, John is sitting in an adequate Quality Inn in downtown Chico, California, about ten blocks from Chico State University.  We left Washington early this morning by car for Baltimore Washington Airport, all connections went well, and TSA Pre is just fine for getting through security.  United put planes in the air on time, and we broke the mandatory airline fast with a mediocre sandwich in O’Hare.  We had to do that since United does not really offer meals anymore, in fact they barely offer seats.  The travel was easy, but you have to be prepared to spend six hours sitting in economy seats the size of an old-fashioned phone booth—two hours from BWI to Chicago and another four hours from Chicago to Sacramento.  Fortunately both of us had good books and were able to turn off the annoying video screens United puts about eight inches in front of your nose.

Bitching over.  We arrived in Sacramento and got our bags (it took a long time, sorry, bitching not quite complete), but the airport has an collection of installation art unlike most.  Inside the baggage center are huge stacks of old suitcases and steamer trunks reaching the 10 meter (30 feet) high ceiling, with their old fashioned travel stickers and their painted names.  Outside the airport boasts a collection of glass mobiles/stabiles that resemble either planes, large birds or large insects depending on your viewpoint.   

The rental car turned out to be a full-size Chevy Impala, which is surprisingly comfortable and easy to handle.  We drove north from Sacramento along some freeways, but most of the route to Chico took us through small towns, orchards and farms, with a long-range view of the Sierra Nevada foothills in the distance.  The small towns we passed through gave us another view of California, one John had forgotten and Ben has never really known.

Chico, our current stopover place, is a university town.  It has some very well-preserved old buildings from the 19th century when it was founded,  It was home to found John Bidwell who ran for president in 1892, only to die eight years later in his wife’s arms. 

We ate at a smallish Indian restaurant on a wide boulevard, the Esplanade, that runs through the center of town.  The Priya Restaurant filled us very completely with a selection of vegetarian pakoras as a starter, then offered vegetarian curry dinners which we gobbled up.  Ben had a vegetarian curry of several vegetables while John had a paneer Indian cheese curry in a mild tomato cream sauce.   We had the full surround of lentil dall, raita yoghurt, another vegetable curry (excellent) and several types of bread.  John had an excellent Taj Mahal beer, which is a light-ish lager. The meal was not strikingly spicy, but it was comfortable, the service was excellent and the room air conditioned enough to make up for the 102F (39C) temperature outside.

After we filled ourselves we stopped by the Bidwell mansion to view the house the town’s founders built, then drove through downtown to get a glimpse of Chico State and now are finishing up a full, and quite good, day.

Tomorrow it is off to Lassen National Park and then to Ashland.