Moscow Vacation
Last Thursday, Moriah, Aletheia, and I left Medford for a vacation, the first vacation I’ve taken in over a year. We drove up to Canyonville first, where Moriah had an Avon meeting at the Seven Feathers casino conference room. (What a depressing thing a casino is.) During her meeting, Aletheia and I explored downtown Canyonville, ate at a Mexican restaurant, and spent some time at a park, where Theia enjoyed the swings, a slide, and a little helicopter which Theia pretended to fly after patting the seat and insisting that I climb in to be her co-pilot.
When Moriah’s meeting finished, we continued our trip up to Portland, ate supper with Doug and Amy Hayes, and then flew to Spokane, where our friend Pat Greenfield met us and drove us down to Moscow, Idaho, where we spent the next week.
The town was pretty quiet since the school year was over and most of the university and college students had gone home. The exception to that general quietness was an incident on the Saturday night after we arrived: a man opened fire on the courthouse and sheriff’s office, which are only a short distance from the house where we were staying. We were already in bed or getting ready for bed and we didn’t hear the shots.
We were able to see a lot of friends, which was something we had been looking forward to. I especially enjoyed spending some afternoons sipping cortaditos at Bucer’s and reading. I’d taken along some books that I’d been looking forward to reading, so I spent some afternoons with Gene Wolfe’s The Wizard, C. S. Lewis’s The Screwtape Letters, Eric Hoffer’s The Ordeal of Change, and Azar Nafisi’s Reading Lolita in Tehran.
But the highlight of our time in Moscow was probably our meal on Wednesday evening at West of Paris, a French restaurant owned by our friend, Francis Foucachon. It was probably the best meal we’d ever had in our lives. We’ve been talking about it ever since, and I’m sure Moriah will describe it on her blog soon.
We returned home on Friday refreshed and eager to get back to work here.