Coos Bay to Florence, OR. Driving the Vanagon up the coast.
Writing this from the Route 101 Restaurant in Florence: come for the wireless access point — stay for the breakfast! Or something to that effect.
After wandering hungry and aimless through Coos Bay, I headed over the bridge and into the Oregon Dunes. I suppose it’s fortunate at this point that I didn’t have the Pinzgauer, as I might have been tempted to go out driving in them — and no off-road trip is complete without spending hours trying to dig yourself out of sand (or mud, or snow, or whatever), right?
Instead I stopped off at Spinreel, one of the many quad and dunebuggy rental places along the dunes, and rented a four-wheeler for an hour. I would have chosen a little Odyssey-style dune buggy, but the woman talked me into a quad, and it probably performed a lot better given my size and the fact that they seem to have detuned the machines a bit to prevent speeding. But I had a really fun time.
I still have some guilt about ruining the environment for the sake of a little sightseeing and some gravity play — though the dunes tend to fix themselves fairly well, there was a fair amount of detritus on the beach from previous riders. But it was still a kick. The “10-mile” road out to the beach (actually about 2 miles) was especially bumpy and mogul-y, and the beach was deserted and beautiful and cold and windy, so I headed inland to the dunes.
I’ve driven on dunes before, in Jeep and Land Rover and once in my dad’s brand-new pickup (he felt he needed to get stuck, the day he got the truck!), as well as on motorcycles. The quad was a lot of fun though I think I especially like a nice low-slung powerful dune buggy. Dune diving feels nearly identical to skiing, especially the g-forces as you go up and down and sideways over incredibly smooth slopes — and the geography is strangely similar as well, with islands of forest and moguls and tree-lined paths and wide flowing open spaces.
The woman recommended the campground down the road, which had about one single space left, that was flat and level and had a fire angle (two pieces of steel at an angle, with a grill on top). So I burned most of the wood I had left over from my surf scooter, and my two-week-old LA Times. Drank a few of my remaining beers (better than letting them explode in the cooler!) and fell asleep to the sound of a heavy dew on the roof.