Winnebago Voyage: Lots of beaches

While we were getting ready this morning, Tommie looked out at the sandbar across from the campground, which had had seabirds on it yesterday, and noticed that the lumps looked different. We got the binoculars out and saw a bunch of seals! (or sea lions…not sure how to tell from that distance.) They were wallowing around on the beach and slithering in and out of the water. There were several dozen.

We headed the few miles into Tillamook and first stopped at the Blue Heron cheese & wine shop where we bought a few delicacies. Then we went a few miles north and toured the Tillamook Cheese Factory. Their dairy products are famous throughout the northwest. (We've been buying their ice cream for a while.) We were lucky to find one of the few shady parking spots so we didn’t have to worry about the dogs. They have a self-guided tour on the second floor where you can look down in two directions. One side has the mixing vats for the cheese, and you can see the curds being squished out into blocks in plastic bags. Then, they go to the curing rooms. The other side shows the blocks of cured cheese coming in on conveyer belts and being cut and wrapped. If the weight is over or under, an air blast shoots them into a bucket off to the side. There are lots of informative panels about the development of the diary industry in the Tillamook Valley. When the settlers got the land cleared, it didn’t grow crops well, but it did great with grass, so they raised dairy cattle. And, shipping milk presented problems in those days, so making cheese solved that (after they figured out how to make it!)

Then we started up the coast, stopping in little villages and beaches. It was cold (58-64 degrees) and really windy, so it was NOT a good beach day! I don’t think they have many of those around here.