Florence is a city on the Central Oregon Coast. Was voted as the #1 retirement community a couple years ago.
Many of the ideas in Frank Herbert's Dune series came to him during a trip to Florence to write a magazine article about a US Department of Agriculture project there.
Florence is also known as the site of the exploding whale, an incident when the Oregon State Highway Division tried to remove a beached whale by dynamite - with unintended results.
