Ashland

After a somewhat clausterphobic but uneventful 8 hour drive from Olympia to Ashland we arrived at our campground.  My first thought was "this place is really run down"...luckily, I have kids to see for me, and they went bonkers over the very wobbly merryground in the camp's "park".  E promptly fell off and scraped the entire right side of his face up. After a quick pasta dinner, we went into town for ice cream. The weather was a little cold but very sunny, and Ashland, OR is really wonderful medium sized town. It is best known for it's Shakespeare festival, but Southern Oregon University is here as well and Ashland is just the sort of crunchy, granola BoBo paradise that I love. There are a lot of coffee shops, trees, and tastefully restored older homes. After ice cream, we found a great park with a fantastic rope climbing tower that I will post pictures of soon. 

 Since there is WiFi at this campground, Ariel and I got to watch the Daily Show while everyone else was asleep. This morning when we woke up, there was still frost on the ground, and we were very slow to get out of bed. The kids celebrated by having a watergun fight in their shorts and sandals and then, shockingly, complaining that they were cold. 

 Today we have another 7-8 hour drive to Mackericher State Park near Mendocino. We will switch over from I-5 to 101 and go through the Redwoods. I finished Better by Atul Gawande and am going to start in on my Pediatric Text Book and Lolita until car sickness and curves force me to stop. Better was a wonderful book - it was a series of essays he had written on medicine focused around the ideas of how it (and humanity in general) can be better. The concepts include diligence and integrity. I had read some of the essays before in the New Yorker, but I still enjoyed reading them again. One of my favorite chapters was on the clash of medicine with birthing traditions. I hear a lot about the damage that obstetrics has done to women in the medicalization of birth through my midwife friends, but he did a wonderful job of making me understand that medical reasoning and the conflict of seeing labor and delivery as a craft vs. a science.