Tillamook, Oregon

According to the Moon guide, the small town of Tillamook is home to the third most popular attraction in the state – the Tillamook Cheese factory.  It claims that over a million people a year visit the factory to do the self-guided tour.  We were skeptical about those figures…I mean, it’s just cheese, right?  But we thought we should probably check it out for ourselves, especially considering how much we both love cheese.  Apparently we’re not the only ones…the parking lot was nearly full and there were easily a thousand people milling around, eating cheese (free samples!) and gorging on ice cream (not free, but the line was super long).

The bird’s-eye view of the packaging process was like something out of the show “How It’s Made”.  Those orange brick-looking things on the conveyor belt are the 40-lb blocks of cheddar.  That’s a lotta cheese!

One thing we noticed was that they seemed very concerned with quality control…and to be honest, seeing this on the production floor wasn’t exactly reassuring.  But we’d already tasted the free samples and lived to tell about it, so no harm done!

Our next stop in Tillamook was the Air Museum, which was originally built in 1942 to house war blimps, of all things.  They were used as air escorts for large naval convoys and also for anti-submarine coast patrols.  Seventeen enormous hangars were built around the country to store the airships – two were built here in Tillamook, but one of them burned to the ground in the early 1990’s. 

It’s hard to tell from that photo, but the hangar is enormous – it is supposed to be the largest wooden structure in the world by volume.  (It was built entirely out of wood because steel was needed for the war effort).  It’s 192 feet high and over a thousand feet long.  Inside is an impressive collection of war planes.

Looking inside, it’s easy to believe that this building was used as storage for not one, but eight 250-foot-long K-ships.  K-ships were helium-filled blimps, which are different from with dirigibles (rigid airships, like the Hindenburg).

Photo courtesy of Tillamook Air Museum

After our recent trip to the Boeing plant, we enjoyed looking at the variety of designs of all the warplanes in the hangar. One of my favorites was this P-38 Lightning – the chiquita banana lady on the nose was sure to strike fear into the hearts of the enemy.