Jacksonville, Oregon

Wednesday – 23 February 2000: After a good sleep, we awakened to partly sunny skies and there is a creek and a lovely sign in front of Goldie reading “Please pick up your pets poop”. We decided to stay over another night – probably just to delay having to give up living on the road. We must have vagabond blood somewhere back in our family trees. The weather was nice, so why not? We headed out in the car to tour historic Jacksonville, Oregon. It was a very quaint town (Oregonians can drop down to the next paragraph now) in the hills of southern Oregon. It was a gold rush boomtown and was the most important stop between Portland and San Francisco. The town has been kept in its “original” condition as much as possible. We visited the museum and walked around the streets and visited the Jacksonville Inn. Later, we drove along a beautiful road above the town and saw a small herd of deer having lunch. In the summer, Jacksonville is host to the world famous Britt Music Festival. This area is full of pear orchards and this time of year, they are full of smudge pots which can be lit to keep the trees from freezing.

DT, on a typical Jacksonville street


The historic museum building

We headed east, toward Medford and stopped at Harry & David – a company made famous by shipping the fabulous local pears, and other delicacies, around the world. We found many wonderful treats and bought lots of gifts for our pizza bunch. According to their brochure: “Harry & David Holmes took over their family orchard business in 1914. For many years, the exclusive pears they shipped to the grand hotels of Europe enjoyed a worldwide reputation for excellence. But when the Great Depression hit, the brothers were forced to seek new markets. So in 1934, Harry set off for New York and David to San Francisco, carrying samples of the rare fruit they hoped to sell to American industry moguls of the day. By the time they returned, they had gathered enough orders to start a new mail order business. Today they ship 11,000 tons of pears a year.” Well, it wasn’t pear season, so we bought the snacks!

It was getting towards the middle of the afternoon and we needed lunch, we headed down to the freeway to Ashland, home of the Oregon Shakespeare Festival. (There are sure a lot of world famous festivals in this valley – happy we stayed over to check it out!) We found a brew pub with the most interesting menu and we just had to try! Too many things to tempt us, so the waitress gave us samplings of several things. Veggie black bean chili, garlic fries, grilled Portobello sandwich on foccacia bread, seed bread with two spreads: Garlic mayo or roasted tomato. Then DT ordered a salad for “something healthy”. He also tried their India Pale Ale and I tried their ginger lemonade. Yummy. We could not finish the fries, so we had them boxed and they permeated the car for the rest of the day. We toured around Ashland, checking out their beautiful parks, the campus of Southern Oregon University and re-visited some of the places DT used to haunt while he did his geology mapping project for the U of Oregon in 1977. We even saw a house with two camels in their front yard!

But, then the clouds came in and it became very cold, so we headed back to Goldie. We stayed in this evening, watching a movie. Tomorrow we need to get home. We have had a lovely three weeks!