After Matt finished being a Rock Star Runner at the Rock & Roll half-marathon, we drove out to McMenamins Edgefield to celebrate our twelfth anniversary. As you can see by this picture of the main lodge, it was raining rather hard. Edgefield's first incarnation was as the Multnomah County Poor Farm. It was McMenamins' first venture into the hotel business.
Eventually, the rain let up and we took a walk. Here we are outside of the Little Red Shed and Grove. Where they don't want you to have picnics on those oh-so-tempting tables because they want you to buy their food.
We walked down and found the statue of Jerry Garcia.
It's officially called "Garcia Bronze" and is by Joe Cotter. There are faces sculpted in the statue.
Matt puts his hand in where Garcia's fingers would be. The gift shop also has a very nice postcard of the statue festooned with red roses for Garcia's birthday.
Here's the Little Red Shed, looking like a cute little hobbit house. Unfortunately, this is one of the places people can smoke cigars and someone was partaking in that particular vice, so we beat a hasty retreat.
All the mileage signs on the property are done in a slightly different style. I intended to take pictures of several, but failed in that task.
Of course we would stop by the quarter acre vegetable garden. It provides produce for their fancy schmantzy restaurant.
Pretty door to the garden.
There were many good porch sitting opportunities which we did not partake in due to the rainy and cold weather. Seriously, this place is lousy with porches. I recommend a multi-day stay just to experience all the porches.
Here's the Gorge Glashaus, which is housed in the Poor Farm administrator's garage.
No burns for a while.
Here's the Herb Garden.
We take a seat on the cobb bench while Matt checks our walking tour map.
Pretty bird houses.
Here's the former Doctor's Quarters which is now Ruby's Spa and Soaking Pool. We were very excited to experience this soaking pool which is much larger than any of their other soaking pools. I have no pictures of the soaking pool, but it's one of the pictures currently being featured on the picture roll for the hotel.
Interesting cactus garden.
McMenamins started out as brew pub guys, but they've expanded into distilling spirits too.
Potato bed!
After our walk, we ate in the Black Rabbit Restaurant and had a very good meal. I had a crusted salmon that was tremendous. I took this picture, though, because I loved the painting behind Matt. It shows old ladies, presumably ghosts of poor farm residents, sitting on the porch and "supervising" the renovation.
We stayed in Old Dad Watson's room. I loved that our room number was 2. I don't think I've ever had so low a room number. One thing that was missing from Edgefield that we've had in other McMenamin's hotels: sinks in the room. I did miss that. Bring a water bottle or two and you will be fine, though.
