Lithia Springs Resort, Ashland, Oregon

The Lithia Springs Resort is imbued with a sort of Shakespearean vibe.

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I don’t mean Shakespearean in a “ruffled collar and everything smells of urine” kind of way. No. I mean in a magical, Midsummer Night’s Dream kind of way, where everyone is accidentally falling in love with Helena and Puck has to run around restoring amends. And if you don’t watch your step, you might squash a pixie with your foot.

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I mean in that kind of way.

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Rand booked the resort last year, in hopes of trying something new for our anniversary. Longtime followers of the blog know that we return to Ashland nearly every summer (brain surgery notwithstanding), and that our experience with several of the hotels down there has been … difficult (at one point, the phrase “wookie sex dungeon” may have been used to describe the cleanliness of one of the establishments). It became apparent, after last year’s debacle (wherein the hotel cancelled our reservation, telling us it was all booked up, then claimed that we were a no-show and charged us anyway – a staggering $500 for two nights, for a room that we never slept in), that there were only a handful of places left to try that worked within our budget.

And so we went with the Lithia Springs Resort. It sits on the edge of town, a series of little bungalows arranged around a garden that smelled of lavender.

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One of the draws of the resort is the mineral springs which run deep underneath it. The faucets in all of the hotel rooms draws from this source, and the water supposedly has healing properties. We didn’t notice anything terribly significant about the water, save for a slightly-eggy, sulfuric smell. It got us clean (the egg smell, fortunately, did not linger on us), which is all I really required of it.

We had our own little cottage, right off this rotunda.

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It was absurdly cozy – there was a bedroom at back with a spacious bathroom, and a living room (in which we spent far too much time on the couch, watching television and squealing whenever local commercials came on).

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We even had a little back patio, all to ourselves.

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And right in the living room was this: a kitchenette, and a bathtub.

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That’s right: there was a bathtub in the living room. I was over-the-moon about this, because the configuration was such that you could lay in the bath, watch television, and pull things out of the fridge all at once. If that’s not the American dream, I don’t know what is.

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On most mornings, we’d drive into town, and wander around until the heat drove us back to our air-conditioned, shady little cottage. If we timed it right, we’d get back just at the start of afternoon tea (which, for me at least, involved the consumption of a copious amount of cookies and scones, and shockingly little tea).

Breakfast was included with our stay, and we managed to miss it nearly every morning. I am proud of this fact.

That was how we spent the week. It went by quickly, and the only complaint I could muster up was the short drive to town became bothersome after a while. The Rogue River Valley is already remote, and we isolated ourselves even further by staying on the edge of town. But by doing so, we also put some distance between ourselves and the hotels and inns that had irked my temper in years past.

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Sitting in the garden at Lithia Springs Resort, those other places felt a million miles away.

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And that was okay by me.

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