ROAD TRIP! Setting up House in Eugene

Image: A.N. Smith-Lee

It being Saturday, the first thing we wanted to do was 1. Eat breakfast 2. Go to the Eugene Saturday Market/farmer’s market downtown. The Saturday market was filled with craft items such as tie-dyed T-shirts (a big fashion item here, judging from the number of people wearing them on the street), earrings, paintings, essential oils and several booths with glass pipes – pretty, but I wonder how hot they would get once lit. We cruised the produce side which was full of gorgeous stuff, from Thomcord grapes to 10 different varieties of peppers. No doubt, this is a fruitful growing region!

After wandering around scouting for a breakfast place, we came upon an extremely popular waffle place (waffles are as ubiquitous as tie-dye here, and infinitely more digestible – or so I thought). The name was Off the Waffle (there’s some kind of pun here, but I’m not getting it. You’re off your waffle if you eat there?). Our waffles were undercooked – raw in the middle – but I wasn’t sure if this was some hip Eugene style and I was too uncool to appreciate it or....I asked our seatmates, and found out, no, not supposed to be raw. The waffles were topped with an undercooked egg (in fairness, they did ask me if I wanted it hard-cooked). Within the hour, I had all the symptoms of mild food poisoning. I’m sure this isn’t the norm for the place, as it really was packed (and they offered me a $30 coupon when I told them about it – no, thank you very much).

We returned to the hotel (and the wonderful hotel bathroom…sorry, TMI), and attempted a late lunch at Sweetwaters on the River after things had calmed down a little. Great salads, though they were short-staffed that day and we spent way too much time looking at the (admittedly pleasant) view.

A novel fence in the Whit    image:A.N. Smith-Lee

We cruised the latest up-and-coming (and somewhat funky), neighborhood, the Whiteaker, known as "the Whit" by locals, notable  for it's artists and murals.

Next, a trip to Springfield, home of the Simpsons! No, not really – just a fair-sized town east of Eugene. We decided to take Rte. 58 along the Willamette River out to Lowell to see what a covered bridge looked like out here in the west (saw plenty of them in Pennsylvania – another fixation, like lighthouses). Unlike the covered bridges I saw back east, this one didn’t seem to have the same function; though useful for keeping snow off the road, the ones in Pennsylvania usually were privately built and came with a toll. Whether that was the case here, I couldn’t find out.

The Dexter Reservoir outside of the town of Lowell captured the light beautifully, but as we drove east along the river into the cascades we were missing something: a river. It was shallow or dried up the farther we got into the mountains. This was shocking, especially since I imagined Oregon to be considerably wetter than central California. The concierge at the hotel said they had experienced “a California summer” – meaning no rain since May. Apparently, those who poo-poo global warming don’t travel north much.

Somewhat discouraged, we decided we needed beer – dinner at McMenamin’s North Bank was everything we had hoped, and after a beer flight and burgers, we were downright cheerful.

It was our last night in Eugene, in our lovely room at the Valley River Inn. The Inn was the largest Hotel and convention center outside Portland when built in the early 70s, and played host to Elvis Presley, the Bolshoi Ballet, Bill Clinton and other celebs. It’s still the town’s big ticket, and the location is great.

ROAD TRIP! Wild Coast

image: A.N. Smith-Lee

Dragging ourselves out of bed the next morning, we went down to a pleasant continental breakfast and headed out Rhododendron Drive to the jetty. The weather had become more of what we expected: windy, cold and wet. It was beautiful, and wild. We walked out the jetty, comprised of hundreds of massive stones to protect Florence harbor. A man I talked to said the sand covering the rocks was seasonal – In midwinter, it’s blown off, leaving the rocks bare for shell hunters; in spring, it begins to blow again, covering the rocks and causing the dunes to shift into high gear for the summer. Fishermen cast off all along the jetty; a lone surfer in full wetsuit came in from the cold. We retired back to the Bridgewater for a bowl of their fish stew (highly recommended). Then, off to another marvel – the Heceta Light. If you’ve read any of my books on Maryland, Delaware or the Chesapeake Bay, or the blog on lighthouses in Marin County, you know lighthouses are one of my passions.

image: A.N. Smith-Lee

 Twelve miles north of Florence on US 101, we crossed a magnificent iron bridge over a pale sand beach and turned onto Heceta Head. Named for Don Bruno de Heceta, the surveyor who traveled the Oregon coast for the Royal Spanish Navy in 1775, Hecata Head became the site for a light station in 1892, Stone from the Clackamas River and bricks from San Francisco were brought in by ship, ferried into the beach, and carried hundreds of feet up the side of Hecata Head to build a 56-foot lighthouse, housing for the head lightkeeper, two assistant lightkeepers and their families, a barn and two kerosene oil houses. The first-order (largest) Fresnel prism lens –the only one still operational in the US, created in Britain by the Chance Brothers – first illuminated the night in 1894. It continues to operate today, producing 2.5 million candle power, one flash every 10 seconds, reaching to the horizon.

The light and remaining structures are surrounded by trails and forest. A fresh, insistent wind billows out jackets and caps. Before electricity, there was a path with a chain-rail from the lightkeeper’s cottage up to the light itself; the rail was to hang onto in the black and windy night when a shift change was called for; you can still see part of it on the trail. Volunteer guides give an excellent accounting of the life of lightkeepers and the history of the light itself.

Lightkeeper's cottage B&B   Image: A.N.Smith-Lee

The assistant lightkeeper’s cottage still stands, and is now a bed andbreakfast. As they say, “…fulfill a fantasy,” and live the life of a lighthouse keeper for a night or two in this gorgeous setting. Did I mention the air here couldn’t be fresher? It’s almost alive.

Back to Florence to turn east again, through the luminous mist and clouds of country along the route from the coast to Junction City. A friend had lived a very contented life there 20 years ago, and my image was of a small country town. Incorrect. Junction City is now a miles-long highway strip mall along Rte. 99 with tire dealers, smoke shops and the occasional gentlemen’s club. I could see, from the main drag, an older part of town that once charmed those who lived there. Time doesn’t just march on, sometimes. It stumbles, scrapes both knees, and doesn’t bother to clean itself up.
I ended up making a phone call in the public restroom of the Junction City Safeway to our hotel for the night in Eugene, the Valley River Inn. Most accommodating, they were able to change our reservations to one night earlier.

We headed south on Hwy. 5, and pulled into the Inn, at the base of a large shopping center, Macy’s et al. The hotel was vast, as was our room, which looked out onto a pleasant vista: a branch of the Willamette River. Dinner that night was cross-your-fingers: we drove in the dark to a place in the newish north east part of town, Pho the Good Times – kinda corny name, but good noodles, and popular with the dinner crowd. Google Maps got us there and back, and so to bed.

Unless stated all images by Joanne Orion Miller