West Coast (8, 9) Ashland

On Friday morning we were able to move into the other bedroom at Nancy's so that the girls could have their own room. We spent the morning hanging out in town, doing some shopping, going to Lithia Park, and arranging for our rafting trip the next day. In the afternoon, after lunch at Pangea, Michelle from Sitters of Ashland came to hang out with the girls. We went to see Medea/Macbeth/Cinderella which was sort of clever, and sort of overwhelming to try to watch (three plays happening simultaneously on stage, which lots of concurrent conversations). After the play we met up with the girls and took them to dinner at one of the places down along the creek. Afterwards the girls watched part of the Green Show before I walked them back to Nancy's to meet the sitter. In the evening Jonathan and I saw Romeo and Juliet, which was amazingly well done. The next morning we went down after breakfast and loaded up for the rafting trip. I highly recommend Noah's, the company organizing the trip. We had so much fun! We went on the scenic float, which was perfect for the ages of the girls right now--mostly flat water, but a few class 1 and a few class 2 rapids. They brought along a really awesome lunch for us with fresh veggies, hummus, chips, dip, cookies, plus stuff to drink--it was the perfect thing. We got to see several great blue herons, as well as some other smaller birds. It was a nice hot day so we jumped in the river a couple of times. Evelyn was really scared before we went, and spent the two hours before getting into the boat crying and saying she wasn't going, etc. Of course, once we got in the boat she was the most enthusiastic about the whole trip. Now she's saying she wants her next birthday party to be a rafting trip. :-) When we got back from rafting we had a couple of hours before dinner so we did some more shopping, went to the park again, and then had dinner at Macaroni's. We plotted out our spots at the Green Show really early (too early?) and it was really hot so we just sort of hung out and tried not to melt. The Green Show that night was a troupe of actors from Iraq. They did this cool presentation where they would switch back and forth in their Shakespeare skits between English and Kurdish based on random audience members shouting out a signal to them. The girls were quite taken with it (although I don't think they could understand the words, even when the actors were speaking English!) Anyway, they wanted to stay for the whole thing and so afterwards Jonathan ran them back to the house to meet the sitter while I went and visited Starbucks so I could stay awake during the evening play. We saw "The Very Merry Wives of Windsor, Iowa" which was hilarious, if slightly "corny" (hee hee!)