Bringing my blog up to date, I got my temporary crown fitted, as planned, on Thursday, but not before suffering another hour and a half of drilling to get my tooth in to shape. that's 7 hours in the chair so far. The final crown will be delivered a week on Thursday - the day before Jo and I head to Portland, and 2 days before we go to Hawaii - and hopefully that will be that.
After my crown fitting last Thursday, Jo and I decided we had to get out and do some exercise, so we drove south west towards Cave Junction and the nature interpretive trail and boardwalk there. It was very short but we spotted other trails just across the road and decided to try them out. They, in turn, led to the "Little Falls Trail", so we decided to follow that. We had fluids with us but it was very hot and the falls didn't seem to be getting any nearer, so we thought it best to head back. Parts of the trail were a little precarious and Jo was a bit fearful of taking another tumble:
Jo struggled on the way back - I think she was dehydrated and suffering from a bit of heatstroke. It took her quite a while to get back up the hill where I could drive her to Cave Junction to get some food and fluids in to her.
Despite this fright, we liked the area and decided to make a quick return the following day - suitably armed this time with a picnic lunch. We attacked the Little Falls trail again from a different approach, but were disappointed that the trail didn't afford very good views of the falls, so we moved on to another spot beside a bridge over the Illinois for lunch:
On Saturday, it was back to the water again - this time, the Rogue River. Scott and Lucy's friends, the Englands, had invited us to join them on their boat for a short ride up the river and a picnic and some beers. The ride itself had to be curtailed a little, as the Rogue, like the Dee back home, is running very low and the channels are narrowing daily.
The flat-bottomed jetboats that do the Hellgate ride can go a lot further and they passed our picnic spot a few times. In between, it was like a scene from Deliverance. I swear if I'd heard any banjos, I was off! It did feel like we were in the wilderness but it was wonderful to see some of the large birds around - buzzards and ospreys in particular, and one spectacular viewing of a golden eagle chasing an osprey back to its nest.
I must have applied sunscreen 5 or 6 times that afternoon as the scorching sun beat down on us. The only way to keep cool was to go in the river - even our chairs were parked there so we could wallow in the cool(er) water:
On Sunday afternoon, we were "despatched" by Lucy to the new local "Double Taps" bar on the pretext of using up a $2 voucher she had, thus also giving her a chance to clean the floors.
With my dental work mostly finished - it took up 3 days of last week - Jo and I took the opportunity yesterday (Monday) to make our long-promised escape to the coast. We drove over the mountains through Northern California (briefly) - we lied again when we were asked if we had any produce at the border - then back in to the port of Brookings in Oregon.
Spotting some short coastal trails leading down to the beach, we parked up the car just north of the town and wandered along the beach for a while. We couldn't believe how much debris there was - huge, bleached timber logs had been washed up everywhere:
The offshore rocks and mini islands are very attractive visually, although they are mostly seabird colonies and you're not meant to climb on them unfortunately. The whole of that coastline is like that - especially between Brookings and Gold Beach, which was our next stop.
At the Gold Beach Visitors Centre, one of the maps showed that the Arch Rock Brewery was very close at hand, so we headed there. As it happened, they only had a Tap Room and it is closed on Mondays anyway, but the adjacent "Tav" had food and stocked Arch Rock's beers so we lunched there, after which we took a look around the small town before heading for the beach for a quick kip:
Our car thermostat still only read 62 F, but it seemed much warmer than that in the blazing sun - how else would we have fallen asleep on the beach?
On our return journey, we stopped off at the Arch Rock viewpoint and took a few photos there:
We stopped off in Brookings again, this time heading to the lovely port area where we feasted on ice creams in the evening sun.
The lady at the Gold Beach Visitors Centre, on hearing that we were returning to Grants Pass, advised us to try a small detour through Crescent City and up through what she described as a beautiful drive - a place where they had filmed the Return of the Jedi. We found the road OK but it was very narrow and windy and after a few hundred yards it changed from a tarmac surface to a rough road covered in chippings and holes, so we decided to turn back. No - we didn't see any EWOKs, but Jo described the dark, dense trees as "needing a good dusting"!
So today (Tuesday) is a down day - I've done the morning runs to and from football training for Braeden and I've just listened to my fellow Headbangers' new show on River Dee Radio - and now I'm updating my blog. Time for lunch, I think.
