July 2 - Tillamook Cheese and heading to Portland

It had started raining the previous evening and continued through the morning. I left Newport in heavy clouds of fog, drizzle, and intermittent rain. Kind of funny because there’s all these scenic vistas and things to see on the coast – only I couldn’t see them. Though I did try. I took the scenic loop anyway. I saw the Devil’s Punchbowl that spray frothy water at high tide… only it was low tide and partially obscured by fog.

I had heard that some of the coast further north was nice, but really I couldn’t see it and I knew I had things to do, so I skipped it and headed to Tillamook. Tillamook County in Oregon is home to all things dairy. Farmers originally processed their milk into butter, but switched over to cheddar cheese because it stores and travels better.

There is a self guided tour with facts and history about Tillamook Cheeses with signs, videos, and interactive touch screens. On the second level there are large view points where you can see huge cheese blocks get sliced into smaller cheese blocks, separated, bagged, sealed, and shrunk wrapped. Most of it is done as a combination of human and machine. There was also a Tillamook ice cream counter up there so as early lunch I ordered Grandma’s cake batter, huckleberry, and marionberry pie. Yum. Then I headed downstairs for the cheese samples. They had a little bar with toothpicks and five different cheese samples – first was curds, then different kinds of cheddar, pepper jack, and then some garlic pepper something that was tangy, but delicious. I went through the line twice to enjoy the samples again and to make Dad proud. After the cheese counter you get dumped into the huge gift shop / food shop. There was a snack counter so I ordered the Tillamooker, a grilled cheese sandwich with Tillamook cheddar on sourdough. It was awesome. There’s also an ice cream counter ddown there too which serves all 38 of Tillamook’s ice cream flavors, a few more than the counter upstairs had. Oh well.

After filling up on dairy I headed east to Portland. My map of Portland sucks, but I navigated across several highways with east until I arrived at my hotel. Checking in, I asked the lady if she knew where I could get a better map and she thought hard (looking like it hurt) and said I should try the truck stop. Internet cost extra at this hotel so I asked her if she knew where a Starbucks was and at least she knew that.

On the way the coffee shop, I saw a sign pointing me to the visitor’s center… it was less than four blocks away. The guy working there was immensely helpful, had exactly the maps I wanted, offered some good advice, and told me about some things I didn’t know about. Perfect.

I spent the rest of the evening working hard. I took my last quiz for biological perspectives, re-listened to the frog calls and took a herpetology practical, and I worked on the last essay for the herpetology midterm, proofread it and submitted it. At that point, I was ready to be uber-on top of things and maybe listen to a lecture or two, but that Starbucks closed at 8pm! With about 2 hours before it was time to pick up Aaron, I headed back to the hotel to try to do some laundry – that way we’d both be starting with the same amount of clean clothes. Aaron’s plane landed a little early, but the dude at the visitor’s center gave me the back way directions so I zoomed along the Columbia River and made good time.