Trouble on the Road

On Friday we drove back down to Ashland to see My Fair Lady at the GB Shaw… er, I mean Shakespeare Festival there. When we walked in, there were two grand pianos in the middle of the stage which were clearly intended to act as the orchestra and they weren't going anywhere during the performance. There were also theater seats in the back of the stage where the "chorus" could sit and watch the show along with the audience. The staging was otherwise minimal. The actors were dressed in period costume but the only props were a few sticks of furniture and a chair on wheels. The entire play was clearly intended to take place dodging around the pianos. I was prepared to hate it.

Dancing around pianos

A few minutes into the play however, you could not help but be captivated by the witty dialogue and fantastic music of Lerner and Lowe and a couple of pianos on stage was not going to detract particularly from the experience. This has been judged as possibly the best Broadway musical of all time and personally I would concur, at least as far as the ones I have seen. Certainly it is way more entertaining than Les Miserables which we saw in Utah last year. If there is anyone who is not familiar with this classic entertainment, the gist of it is that the best way to transform a woman from a low class guttersnipe into a fine, upper class lady is to use starvation and mental abuse. Wait a minute, this is starting to sound familiar. Didn't we just see this play?

Anyway, it was a highly entertaining evening and I'm sure we will end up back in Ashland again sometime in the next year or two for more of the same.

We got on the road again Saturday morning headed for Portland. We got down the mountain from Howard Prairie with no major problems and headed north on I-5. Some 20 or 30 miles north of Medford, the motorhome started making a lot of unpleasant noise. Not knowing what we could do about it out in the middle of nowhere, we just kept going until we got to Eugene, then we pulled off  at the truck stop in Coburg, about 6 miles north of town. We pulled into the service area associated with the truck stop and ask them if they could take a look at our motorhome. When they stopped laughing, they gave us a phone number to a mobile RV repair shop that could come out and look at the rig on the road. We called that number and talked to "Bob" who told us that he was somewhere in Washington state doing a job up there and would not be back until Monday or Tuesday. He gave us the number for the RV Corral, a dealership in Eugene. The RV Corral does not work on motor homes longer than 30 feet and referred us to another RV dealership 20 miles away in Junction City. After a few more phone calls, it became apparent that no one was going to fix our motorhome over the Memorial Day weekend and we were stranded in Coburg for at least three days. This apparently is part of the pain in the aaa...adventure of the full-time RV life. Fortunately (I say fortunately because the disaster was not entirely unmitigated) there was a small motorhome park right next door to the truck stop we were stranded in. We limped around the corner and were able to get a camping spot to wait out the weekend.

On Sunday we did a little sightseeing in Eugene, going to a couple of parks including the largest dog park I've ever seen (clocking in at 10 acres of fenced grass). Our dogs actually got along with the other dogs at this place which is better than they usually did in Redlands. There were some nice little old ladies to talk to and a guy playing mini frisbee with his pooch. We also saw the Eugene rhododendron garden but we were a couple of weeks too late for the best of the blooms and the dogs were not welcome there.

Memorial Day poured rain all day so we stayed in and took advantage of the moderately decent Wi-Fi connection. I played through Portal on my computer and am happy to say I am Still Alive. Tuesday morning we should be back to the hunt to find someone to get us on the road again.

Random dog shots