THE STEERING COLUMN

The car continues to perferm well.  The coast has caused some serious tarnishing of my brass' though.  The scenery is beautiful on this coastal route, but the route is just not "old car friendly".  We have encountered many dangerous and aggressive drivers and we are told that it gets worse in CA.  We will try to stay on this route until we get to Sebastopol, CA and then may have to reconsider our route.  Sebastopol is about 400 miles ahead of us.

........AND THAT'S ALL PART OF MOTORING.......

We spent the last two nights in Florence, OR, about half way down the Oregon coast with two of the sweetest hosts we have had on the trip, Ursula and Rudy Dittl.  They are members of the Affordable Travel Club and made our stay in Florence so relaxing and enjoyable.  Rudy is a true American hero, one of the Marines on the first wave of landing craft that landed on Guadalcanal in WWII.  He doesn't speak of it often, but then true heroes did what needed to be done at the time and just keep moving forward through life keeping their personal tragedies and experiences to themselves. We are so thankful for the unswerving dedication and perseverance that he and others made for our freedom.  

Ursula, Rudy, Joe and I.

Ursula is an incredible fiber artist - working with flax and with, of all things, kelp, seaweed and driftwood.  She is well known locally as "The Kelp Lady" and has provided huge wall hangings for Bloomingdales, teaches at the local college and has exhibited in many locations.  I would give anything to have only 1/1000th of her talent!  To take nothing but what washes up on the beach as trash and make works of art is an amazing talent!

This is kelp, the type seaweed that Ursula uses to create her artwork.

To take that plant from the sea and make this wedding dress sculpture is absolutely brilliant!

One of her wall hangings, made of kelp, seaweed, driftwood and fishing line!

Our second day in Florence started out early with an interview and photos with Jack from the Siuslaw Newspaper and then Joe and I explored Old Town, ate at a quaint seafood restaurant along the pier (he ate seafood and I had a hamburger).  That's what happens when one grows up near the Chesapeake Bay in MD and the other is from North Louisiana and has lived everywhere but near the ocean.  The limit to my seafood tolerance is shrimp boiled in "Old Bay" seasoning.  Joe will eat anything that slithers, swims sideways or crawls on its belly - from the sea or on land.  That proves that he is "tweeked"!!

While at the the pier I saw this sea lion.

Also, there were a ton of jellyfish swimming around.  They are fun to watch but you sure don't want to fall in the water with them.  They sting like fire.

After visiting in Old Town Florence, a couple from Venetta, OR, east of Florence who are HCCA members came over to visit us.  They are Diane and Ron Hellekson and have a 1912 Cadillac Touring car and he is restoring a Brass era Jackson car.  We have corresponded and talked on the phone with them but had never met them so this was a real honor to have them come all the way from Veneta to visit .  One of Ursula's friends came over and took us out to visit some sites in the area and Joe and I found a huge patch of blackberries that we did our best to "clean out". Blackberries are definitely considered a weed in Oregon because they are so prolific, but you have to love them for the abundance of fruit they produce, and if you have a good recipe and are a good cook, blackberry cobbler is just around the corner.

Yummy!!  All of the bushes you see behind us are just covered in blackberries!!

We are spending the night in Port Orford, about 3/4 of the way down the Oregon coast.  It is right on the ocean and just before we went to eat dinner down by the docks, we were watching whales spouting.  We watched for about 30 minutes - I mostly watched while Joe did the daily maintenance on the car.  That is the best kind of division of labor!  He does all the driving and maintenance and repairs on the car and I am the navigator, do the blog and tell him where to turn into antique store, thrift store or yard sale parking areas.  I definitely like my job better.

As a general rule we go about 100 miles a day unless something catches our fancy. Tomorrow we are going to try to take a trip up the Rogue Rive in OR on a jet boat.  We have been told it is a fantastic trip and you can see elk, deer and bear if the "fates are with you"!       

Coastal Oregon is INCREDIBLY beautiful!  The beaches are wide, the sand is so soft and deep, some shorelines separated from the road only by dunes, some by rocky cliffs, but all spectacular.

Just beautiful!

We spent the night in Pacific City, OR with HCCA members Jeannette and Ladd Henderson.  They live right on the coast, overlooking this spit of land.  They have quite a few antique vehicles, some in museums in another part of the state and some still in boxes that need to be restored.  

The question among all old car people is, "Will I ever live long enough to restore all my old cars"?  Every old car deserves love - even if it is in dozens of pieces, all rusty and greasy and it currently lives in the corner of the garage under an old tarp.  I didn't mean that Ladd had an old car under a tarp in the corner of the garage, but we all know that there are a lot of cars that fall under this stage of "restoration".

Ladd and Jeannette were great hosts and we thoroughly enjoyed getting to know them.  They love to travel, most of it overseas, and hearing about their adventures was a treat.  Jeannette is a marvelous cook (Joe certainly didn't marry me for my cooking abilities)! 

The spit of land in the picture above is incredibly beautiful.  Can it get much better than this?  Oh, yes. The spit of land is the view outside their dining room window while the huge rock below is right outside their living room window.  Look to the right side of this huge hunk of rock and notice the eye of the needle!

  
Amazing!  Ladd said that in the spring and early fall pods of whales pass between this rock and the shore on their migrations north and south.  What an amazing place to live.  Deer come into their yard quite often, some pretty tame.  As we were driving up their road, we saw a mother deer and 2 fawns. There is an area downtown Pacific City near the Pizza place that has lots of resident bunnies that hang around.   Apparently, the neighbors in the area used to feed them shredded carrots so, being smart bunnies, they stayed and do what bunnies do, and multiplied. Joe and I saw 2 - a quite ordinary looking domestic bunny and another that was pure black - both just hanging out downtown.   

Rugged shoreline south of Pacific City.

Rugged shoreline and sandy beaches.  Just spectacular scenery!!

There  always has to be a "quirky" picture, so here is today's "Quirk".

I spotted this VW bug/camper conversion at a Tillamook, OR RV center.  Some people just think a little "off-center".  I love it!

Tonight and tomorrow night, we are spending the night in Florence, OR, still along the coast.  We went to a Fred Meyer's store (like a Walmart) this afternoon in Florence and it was backed right up to a sand dune with the beach just on the other side.  I noticed a vehicle with a loader on the front - I think they use it to push sand, not snow.

The coast is beautiful, but the traffic has been horrendous.  We pull off often to let traffic go by and have the hardest time getting back on the road.  There may be 20 cars going by before there is a break in traffic.  It was really busy over the weekend but we had hoped that being a Monday, the traffic would be somewhat less.  Keep dreaming!  The beach draws the crowds here in the summer no matter what day of the week it is.

Yesterday was a beautiful day for touring - bright and sunny and beautiful countryside.  We traveled along the WA coast, sometimes through the forests, sometimes with views of the beaches, sometimes along areas where the rivers met the ocean.

Mud flats along the coast.

Saw this wonderful sculpture in a little town along our way.  What is it about people looking up in the sky?  You can't not look up to see what they are looking at!  I knew this was just a piece of metal, but I had to check out what he was looking at.  Just the sky!  For a moment, I felt like an idiot for looking, then decided that was the beauty of the sculpture, it just sucked you in to the curiosity of the moment.  That is great art!

We stopped for breakfast and I ordered one pancake.  Take a gander at what showed up!

Never, never have I seen a pancake this size!  Some one told me that they cook for loggers.  That must be the truth.  Needless to say, I didn't finish it even though it was one of the best pancakes I have ever tried to eat.  We got in the car ready to leave and I put on my seatbelt.  The only problem was that the seatbelt would only fasten in the last hole when it usually closed about 4 holes from the end.  Surely that pancake didn't make that much difference that fast!  Joe was laughing at me because I had fastened one side of my seatbelt to one side of his seatbelt, stretching across his seat.  No wonder I could only fasten it in the last hole.  I felt like an idiot, but boy, was I glad to find out the pancake was not the problem!

There was a motorcycle rally somewhere up the coast, near Pacific Beach, I believe, and we passed hundreds of cycles headed north.

  

Just a few of the hundreds we saw  on their way north.  The forests in this region are so dense that there could have been all kinds of wildlife 2 feet into the vegetation and you would never have seen them.

Driving along these 2-lane roads, we did out best to pull over to let cars pass or ride the shoulder if that was an option.  We pulled over to ride the shoulder at one point and it was like we were driving with square wheels - it was bump, thump, hop, bump, thump, hop.  Don't know what the problem was with the shoulder, but it sure gave us a thrill!
  
We spent the night in Astoria, OR and will spend tonight in Pacific City and tomorrow night in Florence, OR.  
   

Yesterday morning we awakened to grey drizzle that lasted all day as we drove down Rt 101 along the Wa coast through Olympic National Park.  We saw a couple of signs for Rain Forests but decided to go there since we were already driving through forests in the rain.  We spent the night  just south of Pacific Beach, WA at a wonderful motel right on the beach called the Sandpiper.   The drizzle let up about 8:00 PM and I went for a walk along the beach hoping to find agate or other treasures.  I found lots of razor clam shells, seaweed and the shells of crabs and a few broken sand dollars.  No exciting finds and nothing to bring home, but a nice walk anyway.  There are lots more beaches to explore between here and southern CA!

This morning it is bright and sunny and should be a beautiful drive down the coast.  We'll be stopping in South Bend, WA this evening.