Ashland, Oregon -- Classic or Dud?

I've seen the Ashland Greyhound station a few times, but I've never seen the town. I have no stories, but ask me about the Sacramento and Pittsburgh Greyhound stations sometime.

the Pittsburgh station is where I spent my childhood.

but thats *not* why i turned out this way :P

Dud, dud, dud. A thousand times a dud. Many years ago, I lived rather close to Ashland. The place was a tourist trap populated by former bay area types then, the sort of place where the local merchants have made an art of bottling "hippie chic" and selling it at rediculous prices to everyone who stops for gas. That said, it is a welcome respite from the monotony of most of the other small towns that you'll probably be passing through.

OMG it sounds like Asheville NC, where I will be in 16 hours.

(the hippie-chic aspect, not the phonetic similarity)

The worst Greyhound station is Hartford.

I am only pointing this out because I have no idea of Ashland, Oregon. I've driven all over Oregon so I'm sure I've been there but I don't remember. It was all a blur until Disneyland, where my dad beat the shit out of some poor unsuspecting Asian tourist. It was ten years ago but I still pity the poor guy.

We spent some summers there when I was a kid -- don't they have a Shakespeare festival? And mineral water that you can drink from the fountains in the park? Most important to me was a store where you could buy used comic books, copies of Vampirella, Big Little books, etc., which had an enormous, already-faded painting of the Vision from the Avengers on the side of the building -- ten feet high or so.

Classic I suspect.

I was just in Madrid, New Mexico, a hippie outlaw mountain town with no running water. Classic for its middleofnowhereness. These folx weren't college dilettante hippies; they were pretty hardcore.

Classic for the sulphuric water of the Lithia River. Classic for being halfway between SF and PDX/Seattle, making it perfect for summer get-togethers between friends spread across the West Coast. Classic for some really great Shakespeare -- the Henry V that I saw there was amazing. Dud for being otherwise a rather boring tourist town. So I guess classic.

John: The only comic shop I've seen in Ashland in the last few years was on the 2nd floor of a building and didn't, as far as I can recall, have anything painted on the side. I don't remember seeing any used comix for sale either. It was a pretty ho-hum store, although better than no comic store.

Ally: I've been to the Greyhound station in Hartford, and I've been to the Greyhound station in Medford, Ore., which is a larger city just outside of Ashland, and the Medford one is way ickier. Plus it was across the street from a pizza joint where the pizza made me sick and it was served to me by pubescent women with enormous breasts forced to wear very tight t-shirts for uniforms and which all made me very creeped out about the pizza shop's hiring practices.