The Play's the Thing!

Over the weekend David and I took a trip to Ashland, Oregon to celebrate our 3rd anniversary.  Can you believe that it's already been 3 years? 

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People outside of Oregon may not be familiar with Ashland.  Why did we decide to drive 5 hours each way to visit a small town in Southern Oregon?  Here's a clue:

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That's right!  The Oregon Shakespeare Festival!  The Oregon Shakespeare Festival is not a weekend carnival-like event.  It is a permanent fixture in Ashland, with plays showing from February to October each year.  They put on several Shakespeare plays, but also have a variety of other play.  We saw two plays:

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"Pride and Prejudice"

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and "Twelfth Night."

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We also went on a backstage tour, and were lucky enough to get Kate Hurster, the actress who plays Elizabeth Bennet, as our tour guide!

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Since both our plays were in the evening, we did a couple of small outings outside of Ashland during the day.  One of these outings was to the Butte Creek Mill in Eagle Point.  The mill began operation in 1872, and is still active today.  We got to poke around the mill, and see some of the old equipment, including some gears with wooden teeth.

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A few months ago I bought a cookbook called Good to the Grain.  It is a baking cookbook that focuses on whole grain flours.  It has 12 chapters one each for 12 different whole grains.  While we were at the Butte Creek Mill we bought several new kinds of flour that I hadn't been able to track down before: Barley flour, Quinoa flour, and Kamut flour.

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All in all it was a great weekend.  We enjoyed both plays, had a great time walking all over downtown Ashland, and even had a pretty good drive, enjoying a couple of books on CD.