Highlights of Florence

Time to say goodbye to Florence, Oregon. Here are a few photo highlights from our visit and what we will remember...The unique Art Deco stone drawbridge/bridge that crosses the Siuslaw(Si-oo-slaw) River in Florence...it opened in 1936 The arches and stone are beautiful. This  bridge is by architect Conde McCullough

A unique restaurant in Florence called Hot Rod Grill and you can see why...We never tried it, but next time it's on the menu, (ha ha)....We did try Mo's which has very good chowder, but not the best. We really liked Kelly's Cantina, one of the most relaxed places to sit and rock in a cushy chair while you nosh on great appetizers and a nice dinner.

We never know what we might see on our travels. This race car was on the streets of Florence. It looks like an old Indy race car. Eldy said he was pretty sure it was.

And there are sand dunes just down the street from the Thousand Trails park we are staying at, (South Jetty)...If you've got the money or your own ATV's, have a blast on the dunes! The dunes in this area are the largest coastal sand dunes in the U.S. (? read that somewhere) and there are 42 miles of them. Plenty of space to run around in!

OK, What's this? and why am I mentioning it? This was at Kelly's Cantina, a great restaurant in Florence, and it was hanging in an open doorway. I had to ask, because it's just a Zip-Loc bag of water hanging by a pushpin.

The restaurant owner says, this bag of water makes a GREAT fly repellant. And here's the logic behind it...flies have eyes that are many faceted or compound in structure. When light reflects or bounces back to the fly eye from the water in the bag, it gets refracted into MANY reflections. (Uh, Sparky, are you sure you have that explanation right?) Uh, nope! But it's something like that. The fly can't tell what it is seeing--object or human or something to check out, so it backs off from it. The restaurant owners at Kelly's swear it really works. Supposedly, you see these all the time hanging in doorways in the Caribbean open air restaurants. I must say while eating dinner directly in front of an open doorway on the Siuslau River, that we weren't bothered by a single fly. A couple of little gnats, maybe, but no flies.

We've enjoyed our stay at Thousand Trails, even if we did get ourselves into a very tight site just to get cable. We were as snug as a bug in a rug! We could hardly walk around the rig! It's beautifully forested but a little difficult for big rigs to maneuver around, we'd say. A large section of the park is currently not available as they are upgrading to 50 amp service but there were plenty of spaces when we came in. We are just stayed to see the Sea Lion Caves, the Heceta Lighthouse, and Sweetwater Falls, so now it's time to leave for our next destination...Newport....see you on the road!

Maybe we'll have more visitors like this little bird who plopped down on our side mirrors for awhile and tried to make the acquaintance of the little bird staring back at him. (Black capped chickadee?) It took him awhile before giving up and moving on.....just like we will be.....see you later! Tomorrow, we head for Newport, Oregon....LOTS of interesting things to do there....