Shakespeare Festival - Ashland, OR

Hola! It's been awhile. I've been a bit busy and blogging has been the farthest thing from my mind. You see, I'm a bit obsessive when I work on projects. I put my all into the projects and will do nothing else... unfortunately this usually means I burn myself out before completing the said project, but not this time!

Anyways, I'll blog about the rest of my Scotland / Italy / Paris / Iceland trips real soon instead I'm blogging about my weekend away with my niece Alivia.

My niece is now a young woman (not quite a teenager, but almost) and I figured it's time to do something grown-up with her. The Shakespeare Festival is held every year in Ashland, Oregon and it's only a 4 hour drive. Perfect!

So I rented a car (which turned out to be a Decepticon.... I'll explain later), picked Alivia up after work on Friday, we watched the Dr. Who episode with Shakespeare at my place, went to bed late, and then hit the road early Saturday morning.

I tried to teach her the fine art of car dancing on our trek, but she didn't see the point. Come on Alivia!! I told her "One of these days I'll get you to car dance." So this one is a work in progress.

We made it to the hotel a little early so we decided to do a photo walk in the little town of Jacksonville.



We were finally able to check into the hotel - yay air conditioning!!

We changed from our sweaty driving clothes to cute "going out" clothes. Instead of going to a nice restaurant we hit up the local Pita Pit. Seriously SO GOOD! I love the Pita Pit!




This is totally my favorite picture because it wasn't planned. We each thought the other one was smiling.

Our play was Love's Labor's Lost and it was fabulous! They had it set in the 1950's and was a wonderful production. There were parts where Alivia and I (and the whole audience) were laughing so hard. I want to see it again!!!

Remember on Friends (I swear this has a point) when Joey would hit on the ladies with a head nod and a "How you doin?" Ok, keep that head nod in mind.... at the very beginning of the play one of the actors did that head nod to some ladies in the audiences and followed it up with a "How art thou?" It was SO funny!!! hahaha!

Oh, and on the car ride home Alivia and I may have calculated the number of days until she's 16 - the driving and dating age. I may have told her to text the number of days to her parents. And I may have told her that she should make a count down chart and color off a square each day. I can neither confirm nor deny if I did this though.

PS - Back to the Decepticon car. You see Decepticons want bad things to happen and this car wanted me to get a speeding ticket! It kept going 80 without any notice or warning. I don't know how that happened. (Basically a 4 hour drive ended up being a 3 hour drive.)