by Philip

Today’s our second rest day, so we didn’t need to set an alarm – and we managed to sleep in until 7am!!! Our cottage is in a quiet residential street – a couple of blocks away from the highway, and after a slow start to the day we wandered up to the Little Brown Hen café where I had a “plate sized” blueberry pancake – I initially ordered two, until the waitress looked askance and told me they were an inch thick … so I amended my order to one and didn’t manage to finish that! Liz had a waffle, and we enjoyed the buzz of this obviously popular place. There were beautiful stained glass windows in the café, made by a local artist 40 years ago, showing scenes from the town.

Returning home, Liz made some calls catching up with family and friends and I went to a nearby hardware store to replenish stocks of cable ties for our panniers. We got through some mundane jobs like laundry, and then walked into town. 

We went first to the west side and noticed huge sand dunes over the river, with nothing on our side, but with a good view of the draw bridge which was built in 1936. Walking into the old town we encountered a resident who told us the sand had been brought down by the river but we can’t quite work that out. The old town was charming, with craft shops, book shops, galleries, restaurants and ice cream shops, and with a small marina boasting a tiny restaurant selling Oregon’s best chowder. Sitting on the worst park bench ever (slatted steel) we had a call with Cathy, finalising details for next weekend when she flies out to join us, and then dawdled back to our cottage past the oldest house in the town.

After a rest and light lunch (still full of pancakes), watching a graceful Steller’s jay at the bird feeder, we ventured back into town and visited the Siuslaw (pronounced SeeUsLaw) pioneer museum with interesting exhibits showing the way of life from the early 20th century onwards. The curator told us about George Griffiths, who had worked on a family sheep farm in England, and in 1894 at age 35 made the journey across the Atlantic, and from Ellis Island came to Florence where he built a cabin and farmed sheep on 160 acres. He gradually bought more land, increasing the ranch to 1,000 acres before his untimely death in 1911. It was lovely to hear a detailed story about how one individual came to be here.

From there we did a little shopping and returned to the cottage, cleaned and oiled the bikes, and then enjoyed tea and more ginger scones. We played a game à la “my aunt went shopping”, but this time with “I went to America and visited …” naming the places we stayed each night. Surprisingly difficult and we needed to prompt each other. Trying to get where we had lunch each day was completely impossible.

With a smorgasbord of left overs for dinner, we put our minds to preparing for tomorrow – a long ride with heavy headwinds and rain all day … hmmm.