bowler's paradise
It’s been an unusual honeymoon.
We decided to do things a bit differently than other couples. We’re holding our honeymoon a good four-and-a-half months after our wedding. Our crew includes a bubbly pixie and a growing mama-belly. And we’re eschewing the standard “romantic” Paris/Hawaii/Niagara Falls fare for the sea of sticky-faced park-goers called Disneyland.
So far, the experiment has paid off handsomely.
We started with a quick four-hour jaunt to Ashland, site of Oregon’s mammoth Shakespeare festival. We stayed at the Timbers Motel, which was basic but met our needs entirely. An, erm, interesting sequence of events led to my being suspended over the tub in my bare feet, sopping water off the floor with towel after towel, so that I could reach the commode’s water cutoff.
The superintendent was nicely sympathetic. Strangely, that panicked bout of amateur plumbing doesn’t even come close to my worst hotel experience. That “honor” belongs to the piece-of-crap Fairmont in Chicago, which would have been a ripoff at $20/night and was a downright crime at the outrageous $200+ they were charging the company where I worked at the time.
Anyway, we headed south from Ashland this morning and into California. The terrain changed from the forested Southern Oregon mountains to Cali’s ponderosa-infused red clay embrace. We stopped for a photo in Yreka. Before you ask (as I was tempted to) why the Californians can’t spell, know that Yreka is an Indian name and has nothing to do with Archimedes’s famous bathtime epiphany.
We pulled into Paradise for the first stop on what those of you who are in on the joke will recognize as the Tour of Familiar Faces. We idled around the lake for a little while, tucked into some pasta, and went bowling to celebrate a birthday in a crowd of giggling young ‘uns.
Ten frames and several gutterballs later, we wound down with a little air hockey and Dance Dance Revolution. Then it was back to headquarters for milkshakes and, now, Deep Space Nine on the DVD player. And blogging. Nerdy, nerdy blogging.
Stay tuned for more coverage as we approach the artificial but friendly confines of America’s manufacturer of ersatz dreams.