Thursday - September 9
To say that we needed some R&R is evidently an understatement! Geri woke at 11 a.m. after a wonderful 12-hours' sleep, turned the heat on in the trailer and slid back under the covers while the furnace warmed the place up. About 11:30, she rolled out followed shortly by Bruce who did a double-take when he saw the time. 11:45?! Holy criminy! Sleep hadn't come easy for Geri for the past week, though, and that also meant sleep wasn't easy for Bruce. Geri had a case of sinusitis going on that kept her awake and caused her to snore, which kept Bruce awake. She even gave him a break one night and slept on the couch. Not nearly as comfy as our bed! So, the doc gave Geri some meds on Tuesday and we took off for our trip on Wednesday. The meds must be working. :=)
After we got ourselves together, we headed south to the Tillamook Cheese Factory on mostly sunny day. No wind, blue skies and 63 degrees? Boy, did we time this visit right or what?!
Farmer Bruce! You can tell from that tan that he spends a lot of time out in the sunshine with those cows. ;-)
Did you know it takes ten gallons of milk to produce one pound of cheese? We had no clue. The self-guided tour was fun. Can't imagine standing in one place all day long breaking blocks of cheese off to form their own two-pound block. Yes, they stand on thick rubber mats and probably have comfortable shoes, but my legs and back would be screaming at me. The big blocks at the bottom right of this picture come in, are fed through a slicer by the person in the middle bottom of the picture, and the one on the left breaks off each chunk into its own two-pound loaf. You can see the loaves going side by side up the middle to the wrapper. The workers were happy to look up and wave to the visitors. A lot of them laughed, too. Wonder what they said to each other, or maybe we really don't want to know. ;=)
We did some shopping in their sampling and deli area before buying two ice cream cones. Bruce learned at checkout there that Tillamook's medium cheddar was number one in the world. Not surprising. It's great! Bruce ordered a double of his very-most-favorite Udderly Chocolate in a waffle cone, and Geri had one scoop of their pralines ice cream and one scoop of toffee ice cream for hers. Tillamook ice cream is the creamiest! YUM, brunch was great!
It's amazing how things change in a couple of hours. Our drive back was not as warm as the drive down. The marine layer was setting in turning the sky gray, and there was a breeze making it a little cooler than when we drove down the same road earlier. Evening was coming to the coast and doing so rather rapidly. We laughed at a comment one person made at one of the pullouts. Her group was close to our age and she said, "Everyone jumps out of the car, looks and jumps back in." That's about it! Guess we're not the only wimps, though we did take our binocs out at that pullout and glass the rocks to see what we could see. Nothing particularly exciting - seagulls and cormorants.
The one important thing we discovered on this little trek was Hwy 101 is no place for our trailer! The twists, turns and bumps are unbelievable! Everything in our trailer would wind up on the floor or falling out to clobber us when we opened cupboards unless we could drive at 10 mph! So, we'll take the rig back out to I-5 and move down to Florence for our next stopping place when we leave Cannon Beach on Saturday morning.. We had heard and heeded the warnings to stay off of Hwy 1 along the coast, and 101 in Oregon is 1. Duh! Lesson learned.
