The Everywhereist

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Every time that Rand and I stay in an old hotel, we have a similar exchange:

Me: This place is nice. Too bad it’s haunted.

Rand: Baby, this place isn’t haunted.

Me: You’d like for me to think that, wouldn’t you?

Rand: Yes. Yes, I would. I would very much like for you to believe that this place isn’t haunted, because it isn’t.

Me: Whose side are you on, anyway?

Rand: Um … logic’s?

Me: SO NOT MY SIDE, THEN.

Or something like that. The point is, I’m rather steadily convinced that every time we stay at an old, remodeled hotel, we’re going to be haunted right out of there, and Rand’s convinced we aren’t.

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Rand and I have been planning out the year’s travel – or parts of it, anyway (There are a number of trips for which we can never plan. They come up last minute, usually in the early hours of the morning, when Rand will shout from his office something along the lines of ”I need to be in Boston in May,” or “I need to go to Las Vegas next month,” and ask me if I want to join him. Usually the answer is yes, but occasionally it is “COOKIES!” because I am fast asleep and that is primarily what I dream about). And when he mentioned that we’d have to move our annual pilgrimage to Ashland because of scheduling conflicts, I realized something: I didn’t write a word about our last trip there.

I figure it’s understandable: that trip was cut short – sandwiched between visits to Peru and Barcelona, and the six days we spent in Southern Oregon, going to the same place we go every year, didn’t seem worth writing about at the time.

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Southern Oregon is idyllic.

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It’s also the site of one of the most horrific things I’ve ever seen in my entire life (note: on the grand scale of things, this isn’t saying much. My life is a cakewalk, minus the walk).

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Folks, what I’m about to tell you may not apply to very many of you – it’s the sort of niche, uber-specific travel advice that only a few of you will benefit from, but I still think it’s worth sharing. For those of you who to whom it doesn’t apply, I hope you will at the very least find it entertaining. Sort of. Maybe.

The advice is this: If you go to the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, I highly recommend taking the backstage tour.

Take it, because it’s only $12 a person, and you get to see parts of the theater that only cast and crew get to see.

Take it, because you’ll get the chance to see the stagehands tear apart a set and build a new one with such speed and ease, it feels like something out of Inception (even if you haven’t seen the movie. And I haven’t. Tell me nothing).

There were only three of them. They tore the place apart like a Fraggle destroying a Doozer-built creation.

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1. Cut-out decoration of a German man, Ashland Elks Lodge Oktoberfest.

Where in god's name do you even FIND something like this?

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2. Contemplative statue, Lithia Park.

"Shit. I think I left the curling iron on."

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I have a lot of friends who make white van jokes. I mean, we all do, don’t we? Laugh about the nondescript white van that’s lurking around our neighborhood, though in the back of our minds we keep an eye on it, because if some kid disappears, it’s the first thing we’re telling the police.

But such paranoia is wrong, isn’t it? I remember my mother scribbling down license plate numbers and staring at people from a distance, trying to assess whether or not they were child molesters simply by looking at them (and while I have no definitive word on her success rate, I’m going with “no more than average”). I try intently to not be as worried or as hypochondrial as she – a white van, I tell myself, is a white van.

So when I saw this somewhat creepy vehicle parked on a residential street in Ashland, I fought against my mother’s ingrained impulses, and remembered that it was simply a someone’s rundown mode of transportation. Nothing more.

I mean, it has windows - you can't kidnap someone in a van with windows, right?

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Rand and I were walking near Lithia Park in Ashland a few weeks back, when we saw this.

It is an entirely black bee. A quick internet search revealed that what we saw wasn’t entirely that unusual. Depending on species and abnormalities, bees can be entirely black, brown, or sometimes even have tones of red. Nevertheless, we absolutely freaked out when we saw this little guy in the bushes, as I don’t think either of us had really ever noticed one without the distinctive yellow stripes (note: we are city kids. Feel free to ridicule us later, and remember – zombies always strike rural areas first. It’s a historical fact). I think what we saw might have been a Carpenter bee, which are native all along our coast, and apparently FRIGGING HUGE (seriously – click on that link only if you are not afraid of bees at all).

Common or no, this little dude looked the stealth version of a regular bee – awesome and kind of badass, and just a little creepy. The moral of the story? A little bit of yellow goes a long way, unless you are a spy.

I want to say thank you to everyone who, either on the blog, in person, or via email, expressed their sympathies about our fiasco at the Plaza Inn and Suites in Ashland. Your sympathies were much appreciated, but as I look through the pictures, I wonder if all the attention you’ve given me is undeserved. Because in the end, I think I may have had a fantastic time.

Don’t get me wrong: our stay at the Plaza was pure hell and I hate that hotel more than I do mayonnaise and the work of Andrew Calder (and those who know me well know exactly how much that is). But the rest of the trip? It was, like most free moments spent with my husband, pretty damn wonderful. Somewhere in the midst of moving rooms for the third time, I forgot that. I managed to convince you all, and myself for that matter, that our entire anniversary trip was terrible. This was, in no small part because I wanted the entire trip to be perfect for my husband.

And that’s the irony of the matter: the one person who never wavered in his conviction that our trip was fantastic was Rand. He just shrugged everything off, even when he was clearly frustrated. Looking through the photos from the trip, it’s hard to find one where he isn’t smiling – or at the very least happy. Come to think of it, in very many of them, so am I. I was so worried about whether or not he was having fun, I didn’t realize that he – and I – often were. It was a good reminder that even when my brain thinks I’m miserable, my heart knows that I’m not.

Like all trips to Ashland, we started out in Portland, visiting Matt and Kim. For those of you following along at home, Matt and Kim are on my list of things I love about Ashland, even though, like I said, they live in Portland. What? I suck at geography. You should know this already. The point is, no matter how terrible any hotel stay is, Matt and Kim are around. And they are lovely (edit: Kim is lovely. Matt’s kind of a goober. Still, you understand what I’m getting at.)

I didn’t take a picture of them, though. Nor did I take a picture of a brownie that we ate that was drenched in foie gras. Yes. You read that correctly. It was awesome. Here is our reaction to it:

Not pictured: Matt, Kim, foie gras brownie

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