Cedarwood Inn, Ashland, OR
For a good many years (probably twenty) we had season’s tickets to the Oregon Shakespeare Festival in Ashland, Oregon. OSF is a repertory company. Typically, their season runs from February to November and they present thirteen plays during that period. If you want to see all of them, it entails two trips to Ashland – one early in the season to see the first five or six plays and another in late summer or fall for the rest.
All those stays in and around Ashland mean that we are well-versed in the available accommodations. Motels, hotels, bed-and-breakfasts; cheap, cheaper, cheapest; amenities, no amenities. You name it, we know about it. We’ve had good and bad experiences and, being ‘world travelers’ such as we are (ahem!), we take most things in stride. Until the strange lumps in the coffee pot this morning!
This year we had decided to give Ashland a miss, at least as a destination point, but when the stars aligned so that we would be driving to California… well, you have to stay overnight SOMEwhere. We managed tickets to a play that friends had seen and raved about – “The Heart of Robin Hood” – although we had to sit up in the gods. Finding a place to stay the night was harder.
Mind you, this wasn’t exactly a last minute decision. Not unless you consider six weeks in advance spur-of-the-moment. But Ashland was full. So were Medford and Talent and several other nearby locales. Finally we found a vacancy at the Cedarwood Inn right on Siskiyou Boulevard in the heart of Ashland, a mile or so from the theaters. Maybe I should have been suspicious but we’ve taken note of that place before. From the outside it is pleasant looking, well kept up and inviting.
Mystery Lumps
I had requested a room on the ground level – in fact, after making the reservation online, I had called to assure myself that they could manage that. “No problem, Mrs. Stevens.” Of course, when we rolled into town at five in the afternoon, there were no such rooms available. The stairs were steep and, without a railing in one spot – treacherous for a man with a cane but oh well.
The room, itself, was on the ‘bare bones’ order and not too clean, either. We know that because the bedside lamps were unplugged and we had to crawl around on the floor to find an outlet… But the biggest problem was the internet access. We were given the Wi-fi password, managed to get online, but connecting to a site – any site – was impossible. It wasn’t just slow. It flat-out didn’t happen.
We had a super duper dinner in a French restaurant overlooking Lithia Creek, caught the end of the Green Show on ‘the bricks,’ found our seats dead center in the third row from the top of the Elizabethan theater, and absolutely loved the show. Worth every bit of travel travail.
We ‘slept fast’ in order to get an early start, thinking to have a quick cup of coffee in the room and get breakfast on the road. “What the hell?” I heard Nyel say from the direction of the sink and the coffee maker. “There are lumps in here.”
Questionable Labeling
‘Here” turned out to be the well of the coffee maker – the part where you pour the water. The lumps were about the size of raspberries, the color and shape of lumps of coal, and hard. Too big for mouse turds or rat feces. And besides, how would they get in there? Nyel, ever practical and always insistent on his morning coffee, dumped them out and proceeded.
I waited until he took the first sip, didn’t gag and die, and reported that it tasted “Okay; just like motel coffee.” Not quite as advertised, though. The paper cups provided by the proprietors said “Cup of Joy. Caution Hot.” NOT!
Goodness! I’d be wanting to know what they were and would have run a pot of water through the coffee maker once. Ick!