It was warmer this morning than it was yesterday morning, but the fog had settled in thick overnight and it showed little sign of departing anytime soon. We were just as happy, then, that we were leaving today and heading south. We cleaned up Doe Cottage – my parents always insisted that when you rented a place you needed to leave it as clean as you found it – and John did his usual exemplary job of packing the car.
I knew it was going to be a long drive to Port Orford, but I gasped when Daniel displayed that trip at five and a half hours. Still, the Oregon coast is stunningly beautiful – at least when you are not in Lincoln City or Newport – so it was not a bad drive south. We stopped in the lovely town of Florence for lunch.
While Florence presents a good many options for eating – though none highly rated on UrbanSpoon or Yelp – there was only one which seemed to welcome canines. So we had an overpriced and uninspiring lunch on the dockside patio at the ICM C Food Restaurant. It wasn’t very good, but the dogs were given nice big bowls of water and there ample shade for them.
We continued on to Port Orford. John had willingly gone along with all my frugal trip planning, but he wanted one little splurge on this trip. And that splurge was renting the China Mountain House. Probably because it is in the middle of nowhere – Coos Bay is the nearest metropolis – renting this entire house was still far cheaper than a small room at the Santa Barbara Biltmore. And it is way more fun. The place is straight out of Architectural Digest.
The house sits on a bluff overlooking the ocean with panoramic views up and down the coast.
The dogs took little time to make the place their own.
Eli, decided that he looked his most dashing surrounded by contemporary art.
The stairs to the second floor were a little too much for Eli, and even Edie was initially skeptical of them. But she quickly adapted.
In the evening we walked down the hill and tool a stroll on the beach.
It was completely deserted, just the way dogs like it.
On the way back, a smiling woman with yoga mat in the back of her car waved at us. But just after that saw this sign. There was something about the surveillance camera on it and the vaguely fascist emblems on the poles on either side of the driveway (you can see just one in the picture below) that made it seem even creepier.
Tomorrow, we’ll explore the area a little more as well as enjoying our house.
