Trip Report
Put a Dorsey Bus, Dorothy Medill, Ray Cavagnaro and Miss Agness (a jet boat) & The Rogue River, Tu Tu Tun Lodge and the Lucas Ranch's famous dinners and you got yourself a couple days that you're not going to forget.
Leaving Eugene at 8 a.m. with its drizzly looking weather we headed for the coast by way of Drain, Elkton, Coos Bay to Bandon-by-the-Sea. Before getting there we drove to Cape Blanco for lunch.
Arriving at the Prehistoric Gardens we stopped and Ray went in and hassled with the proprietor and got a 50¢ reduction in rates, so most of us went thru these Gardens, most of us for the first time & some who had gone thru them before. Personally I don't go for these what I call tourist traps, but was told a few years ago by Jim Stovall that this tourist trap was well worth it, and found out later that our own Jim Stovall had been called in for consultation during the Gardens construction.
Arriving at Tu Tu Tun Lodge in the early afternoon we had time for short & interesting hikes. The Lodge sported a pool table and a piano, player type and a hundred or more rolls. The piano took lots of pumping but was good exercise on the legs. There was also a large, heated pool, but the only one to take advantage of it was the bus driver. He was the one who brot a swim suit. Not having a swim suit did not stop one Obsidian however. She got up early thinking no one else would be up at that hour, but there was one person up. How do you think this item got in your bulletin?
The rooms had two full sized beds so you could sleep alone or with someone (all rates were on a double occupancy basis). After Tu much supper and Tu much breakfast we boarded Miss Agness for the run up to Agness. Our boatman was something Tu. He did not hesitate to slow down, or stop, or go back down to give us the best view of some deer, a mountain goat, or an otter or maybe an osprey's nest. Or maybe a mama duck with most of the family doing what we were doing - riding - but they were on mama's back.
A few miles down river from Agness we saw one of those big cement rigs in the river and looking pretty much battered up. Across the mouth of the Illinois River the State had built a bridge and had one more week of work to do on it before the opening when one of the largest floods to ever come down washed out the bridge and the cement rig went with it.
Arriving in Agness we were soon seated at the tables loaded down with the food that has made the Lucas House famous. We had appetites, but not of a size most of us would have liked.
Weather was absolutely beautiful. As we neared the coast at Reedsport we came into sunshine that lasted both days.
On this tour were Bernice & Ruby Callison, Gertrude Oswald, Lorena Martin, Bob & Dorothy Medill, Ingrid Carmichael, Thelma Watson, Esther Ansberry, Katherine Meisenholder, Bertha Richardson, Gladys Williams, Russ & Hazel Peck, Reta Ridings, Frances Newsom, Ruth Nichols, Betty Stamm, Robert & Marilyn Morris, Eva Collings, Pauline Warnick, Margaret Markley, Donna Titus, Frank & Sue Riemer, Martin & Ida Putnam, Floyd & Jan Snyder, Rolfe and Bertha Anderson, Ken & Mrs. Ken Higgins & the one and only Ray Cavagnaro.
