CHOLESTEROL CITY

Thursday evening we pulled into the Pleasant Valley RV Park about 5 miles south of Tillamook.  Very nice park, although it seems perpetually damp.  Good wifi, good cable (I just finished watching Stanford demolish Notre Dame – yessir!), excellent bathrooms and hot showers, so a good value at $25 and change. 

Friday morning we made breakfast and I did the dishes from the night before (hey, we’re conserving our tanks, right?), offloaded the scoot, washed off its road grime from the previous day, and took off for the Tillamook Air Museum.  Now, there’s no mistaking where this attraction is located.

Tillamook was one of the three West Coast sites for blimps during WWII, and that’s the remaining one of the two hangars that were constructed here.  The other burned down in the 80’s.  This sucker is over a thousand feet long and 296 feet wide, and made out of wood!  It’s huge inside:

We’ve been to a number of air museums around the country, but this one had some models I had never seen before.  The focus is on WWII warbirds, but some of the stuff is bizarre.  In the center is an F4U Corsair with the bent wings, but on the left is a Duck, one I’ve never seen before.

The J2F6-Duck and this 1934 Bellanca are the strangest.  The Bellanca, with its airfoil struts, ended up being one of the strongest planes ever built and served for decades as a bush plane in Alaska.  the Duck was the first “flying boat” built by Grumman in the 30’s through the 40’s.  It was used by the military for photo reconnaissance, observation, rescue, and mail delivery to carriers. 

The museum had plenty of toys to keep the Mitty’s happy.  How the heck did the pilot keep track of all that?  I think this is an A-7 cockpit.  They flew off the Connie and the Kitty Hawk when I was aboard them.  I never got this close.

Children, avert your eyes.

  

Back on the scoot and a trip around the 3-capes road to yet another . . . . light house!  This one seems to be distinguished by being the shortest of any lighthouse we’ve yet seen.  On the approach, you look down at the thing.

It’s short because it doesn’t need to be tall, being up on a fairly high bluff,

with a great view:

OK, now on to the REAL reason for coming to Tillamook.

First, of course, we take the educational tour and learn that factory cheese making is a series of stultifying line jobs.  How do they do it day after day after day?  And with onlookers like us gazing at their every move?  It’s work, and in this economy a lot are thankful for any work at all.

Don’t ask me what the octopus does; we never did figure it out.  It is an impressive mechanized operation, and from the viewing windows you can see every step from creating the curds, to making the blocks, to wrapping for aging, then the slicing and re-slicing of the big blocks into the smaller package sizes.  This guys at the end of the line, with the 10 ounce finished packages. 

Well, seeing all that fat fly by wetted the appetite.  What better lunch than a grilled cheddar cheese sandwich on sourdough and a bowl of tomato soup.  Yes, it was yummy.

Hmmm.  What better, did I say?  Well, of course.