Floundering in Florence

Late yesterday we arrived (by plane and shuttle bus) in Florence, Oregon on the Pacific coast. In a few days we plan to begin the second part of our trip across the country (i.e., from here back to Colorado Springs.) I'll again be blogging on this site, so people can keep up with our travels through Oregon, Idaho, Montana, Wyoming and back to Colorado. We really appreciate the many positive comments about the blog. Honestly, there are times when I am writing this stuff when I wonder if there's anyone out there reading it.

We expect to cover about 1,900 miles on this leg over 6 weeks. It will likely be different than Part I - more climbing (a lot of mountain passes), more traffic (almost all on state and US highways, no county roads) but more scenic. Hopefully we'll continue to meet terrific people, the best part of these trips.

The tandem accompanied us to Florence (packed into its 2 SPS suitcases) and we had earlier shipped the trailer, panniers, clothes, etc. directly from Mashpee. For the most part everything arrived on time and in good shape. We spent most of the day today assembling the bike and trailer, a job that would take a competent bike mechanic a couple of hours at most. But I am no John Kennedy - I made a couple of major errors (such as installing the front fender backwards), we could not get the drum brake to completely disengage and the bolt that holds the main crankset was AWAL. The latter problem we blame on the gorillas at TSA who have twice in a row opened one of the suitcases then closed it without bothering to repack it correctly. We had hoped to conduct the ceremonial dipping of our wheels into the ocean today and begin riding east in the morning, but we were forced to leave the tandem at a bike shop that cannot complete work on it until tomorrow afternoon.
So we'll do some sightseeing tomorrow morning, hopefully pick up the bike in the afternoon and ride over to the beach (about 5 miles from where we are staying) for the wheel dipping, then head out toward Eugene over the Coastal Range in the morning.
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