Pilgrimage to Tillamook

     Today we took a day and drove to the city of Tillamook. Here is where the famous cheese (and other fine dairy products) are made. Along the way the road leaves the coast and turns inland. You see less and less of the ocean and more and more of huge dairy farms. On the outskirts of Tillamook is the Tillamook Air museum.

     Who knew that during WWII, this was the location for two huge wooded hangars that housed 8 blimps each. These airships provided security patrols of the west coast to protect against enemy invasion or assaults. Because of the need for steel by the war effort, the hangars were made out of locally available wood and built in a very short time. In fact the first hangar was started in December of 1942 and finished in August of 1943. The second hangar took only 27 days to complete!!! They were over 1,000 feet long and about 300 feet wide and over 15 stories high. Each of the blimps stationed here were 245 feet long and filled with over 425,000 cubic feet of helium. They served in a variety of commercial capacities since being de-commissioned at the end of the war. In 1992, Hangar A was used to store hay and it caught fire. The only thing left was the concrete supports for the doors. Luckily, Hangar B still exists and serves as the site for the Air Museum.

     Looking inside the hangar you can't help but be amazed at the craftsmanship and the sheer size of the building. 

     One of the displays shows the relative sizes of blimps of the era. The Goodyear blimp is shown near the bottom at 190 feet in length. The K-Class blimps were the ones that served here.

     A neat photo of how 8 blimps were stored and moored within the hangar.

     The mini-Guppy aircraft outside the huge doors of Hangar B.

     For size perspective, here I am in the cargo bay of the mini-Guppy and it is a huge cavern. Ok--enough about the Air Museum. I could go on for quite some more but then the readers would all fall asleep, etc...

     Driving into the Tillamook area you see a number of patchwork billboards on the sides of barns and businesses. All are unique.

     Local folks with a quilting background thought that it would be nifty to merge the dairies and businesses with a quilt square of their own, similar to that practice in the east. They got together and came up with these and they are proudly displayed throughout town. There is a complete tour that takes you to see all of them.

     Once at the Tillamook factory, you can take a self guided tour. Here you watch these huge 40 pound blocks of aged cheddar cheese roll in and, through a series of cuts and slices they become small one pound blocks called a Baby Loaf and packaged for sale. Later in the tour, you pass through the sample area where you can sample a staggering variety of cheeses (Barb's favorite part). This leads you into the company gift shop where you can purchase larger blocks of the aforementioned samples for your later enjoyment. 

     They are also known for their ice cream which can also be purchased by the hungry tourist. Here I contribute to the local economy and refuel my body for the trip home. 

     On the trip home we stopped by several spots. Above is a picture of the Octopus tree. This is a Sitka Spruce tree that was used as a burial site for local native Americans. It is unique in that it has no  large vertical central trunk, only branches that form the tree, but it is huge and obviously hundreds of years old.

Cape Meares

     This is the Cape Meares lighthouse. Got to be the shortest lighthouse in the world. 

     Not too far from Cape Meares, there is a huge mass of sand dunes near Sand Lake. This is big enough that there were a string of dune buggies that roared in and around the area.