Advertisement
Published: July 25th 2005
Tillamook Cheese Factory
The kids were more interested in this than I thought they'd be. More on that title later.
The Tillamook area seems almost out of place. The smell of cow manure hangs in the air...not enough for it to be a problem, but enough to make you think you're in Iowa. Given that Tillamook's claim to fame is their cheese, and you need milk to make cheese, and you need cows to make milk, and one of the byproducts of cows is manure, it all makes sense.
We at breakfast in the room. We brought cereal and milk for those mornings where we werent' staying in a place that had complimentary breakfast. After that we headed to the nearby
Tillamook Cheese Factory. If our kids could live on one food, it would be cheese, so there was no way we'd skip this place. The visitor center was really nice. They had all kinds of exhibits about the history of the area, the history of the factory, about the cheese making process. That's all well & good, but where's the samples!!
We skipped most of the exhibits and headed upstairs where they had the observation deck overlooking the factory floor. There we watches as hundred of hunks of cheese were cut, inspected, wrapped, boxed
and sent to the shipping department. The cheese was just zipping down the conveyor belts at a breakneck pace.
They must have had some quality control issues as one of the factory drones was busy cutting the wrapper off a bin of cheese and putting it back on the line. At another station we saw where they had a machine that would weigh the bricks as they passed and any that were too light or too heavy were sent to different stations. The heavy bricks had thin slices cut off. These slices were put in a tub and sent to the other station where another factory drone took the thin slices and added them to the light bricks. Fascinating, I know.
It wasn't soon after we got up there that the kids noticed that they had an ice cream stand up there and we were soon all eating our favorite flavors of ice cream. It was a great dessert after our cereal breakfast.
Downstairs to the sample room! There was a pretty big line for cheese samples and we patiently waited our time. It turned out to be a waste of time as there were only 3
Oregon Coast Aquarium
Rock Fish, from below. This was taken in an underwater tunnel. or 4 different types of cheese, but it WAS good cheese and somehow my toothpick always managed to pick up 2 or 3 cubes each time. Darn.
On to the gift shop where we bought several small chunks of cheese, beef sticks, candy, and souveniers. One of the cheapest souveniers of our trip was bought here. They were selling their extra ice cream buckets, complete with the Tillamook Cheese logo, for just 50 cents. We only bought 5, which is rather uncharacteristic of me, but space in the truck was at a premium and we still had over a week to go.
Finally we headed south again. As we drove through the rest of the Tillamook valley, we saw enough cows to think we were back in the midwest. I pointed out a heard of cows to William, to which he responded loudly, "Bye cows, thank you for the CHEEEEEEEESE!".
We made our way to Newport to the
Oregon Coast Aquarium. We got there just in time to see the otter being fed. The area in front of the exhibit was packed but I managed to get behind some kind folks who let the Thomas & Katie in front
of them, but Cheryl wasn't so lucky. Some jerk pushed his way up saying he had to get up with his girlfriend and blocked their view. The otters were pretty entertaining and they took the clams or oysters they were being fed and banged them on the rocks to break them open before eating them.
The rest of the aquarium was pretty neat and the kids really enjoyed it. We saw sharks, starfish, jelly fish, stingrays, urchins (other than ours), turtles, fish, octopusses (octopi?), seals, etc.
Later we went to a quaint part of town along the bay and at at the Rogue Public House. That caught my eye as Rogue Brewery makes some mighty fine ales. This stop didn't disappoint. I asked for a sampler of beer, which most brewpubs have, but the waitress said they don't do that here. She earned her tip though, as she brought out 7 different ales for me to sample. Needless to say, Cheryl took overdriving after dinner.
We ended our day in Florence, at the Le Chateau Motel, a nondiscript little place that we found as we entered town.
Advertisement
Tot: 0.178s; Tpl: 0.012s; cc: 8; qc: 49; dbt: 0.0472s; 1; m:domysql w:travelblog (10.17.0.13); sld: 1;
; mem: 1.2mb
