Cheese and Carrots

"A cheese may disappoint. It may be dull, it may be naive, it may be over sophisticated. Yet it remains cheese, milk's leap toward immortality."
--- Clifton Fadiman

Tillamook, Oregon is a cheesy kind of town, and they'd be the first to proudly tell you that. The countryside is surrounded by fence-to-fence dairy farms -- enormous dairy farms with fields and fields of bovines, medium-sized dairy farms tucked into corners, and dairy farms so small they consist of two cows in the front yard. Wherever you go, you can smell Tillamook's "dairy air" (say it out loud for maximum impact).

Even the visitor center's bench gets into the spirit of things:

The cornerstone of Tillamook is, unsurprisingly, the Tillamook Cheese Factory. They give tours. And free samples. What's not to love?

The actual cheese cutting and bagging can be viewed from windows high above the factory:

The cheese "whizzes" from station to station, machines cutting the cheese (a better job for machines than people!) and wrapping it while happy and cheerful workers sort and monitor a seemingly endless stream of yellow blocks:

After the tour we enjoyed free samples of cheese and had an ice cream in a waffle cone. Did we buy some cheese? You bet! Good thing it is freezable, because we got curds, cheddar, swiss, pepper jack, and their newest, cheddar-garlic-chilli pepper (yummy).

Carrots are devine... You get a dozen for a dime, It's maaaa-gic!
-- Bugs Bunny

Our campground is plethorized by a huge slew of bunnies. Most are brown with white cottony tails, but a few are all black. They have obviously been well fed (and the campground encourages this as long as they are not fed around buildings). They are so tame they will eat from your hands -- as John found out when he took a carrot outside and was immediately surrounded by a furry, hopping crowd of lapine cuteness:

And here's the video proof:

So what do you have if there are 100 rabbits standing in a row and 99 take a step back?
A receding hare line, of course!

Images from the Northwest

Mount Rainier in Washington State is a part of a string of active volcanoes called the Cascade Range, a 700 mile line of mountains that runs from British Columbia to California. It is considered one of the most dangerous volcanoes in the world. It last erupted in the 1800s, but when it erupts again it will most likely be much bigger than the deadly Mt. Saint Helens' eruption -- and Seattle is in the potential danger zone.

Here is a detailed image of the summit of Mt. Rainier and its glaciers. It makes its own weather, but also has an almost continuous venting of steam.

Mt. Saint Helens, another volcano in the Cascade Range, is on the right in this photo. You can see the southern flank, where the side of the mountain blew out in the massive 1980 eruption.

Water is plentiful in the Northwest. In Washington, this waterfall runs through the center of a fallen tree.

In Oregon, the waves of the Pacific Ocean crash into the shore. Here, some waves are so large that the make it over the top of these huge rocks. Note the depression on the top of the rocks that was created by waves cresting the top.

Oregon provides lots of pull-out viewpoints with spectacular views.

The surf rushes out, leaving foam on the beach.

A photographer watches the surf, waiting for the perfect shot.

John Searches for a Pony

A Story For Our Times:
A group of psychologists were testing the most pessimistic and optimistic children they could find. They finally narrowed their search down to two 8 year-old boys. They set up two rooms: one with every toy imaginable, the other with a pile of horse manure.

The first boy, the pessimist, was put into the room with the toys. No sooner was the door shut when he began to throw the toys against the walls. Smashing, and throwing, he wasn't finished until he had broken every toy in the room. When asked why he did that he said, "When I saw all those toys, I knew they'd never be mine, and I didn't want some other kid to get them, so I broke them."

The second boy, the optimist, was put into the room with the manure. The boy's eyes lit up and he dove into the pile, flinging it in every direction. The researcher, wondering if he'd made a grave error, interrupted the flinging fest and asked, "What are you doing?"

The boy said, "With all this poop, there's got to be a pony in there somewhere!"

John has been trying to win a scratch and sniff contest for many days. Each day, when he makes his "Happy Hour" libation, he takes a new plastic Solo cup, pulls off the outer "peel and scratch" label, and carefully scratches off the black "stuff" to see what he has won.

He thought it was odd that he never won anything, not even a free beverage, nor was there an encouraging message like, "Try Again!" or "Better Luck Next Time!" Still, he persisted, cup after cup, night after night.

Until tonight when he actually read the cup.

The contest instructions were not there. Then the truth dawned -- that chalk-boardy scratchable rectangle was meant to be a place where one could fingernail-engrave one's name, ostensibly to be sure that one's cup was not accidentally appropriated by a reckless partier who would either infect it with any manner of pestilence and disease, or in the swap leave one with something undrinkably dreadful -- like a Mad Dog or a light beer.

So John learned: there is no contest, no pot of gold at the end of the red plastic rainbow, no free beverage, and no pony at the bottom of the manure pile.

A sadder, but wiser John will attend future Happy Hours with just a little less optimism at the core of his soul. Damn, you, Solo Cups!

Port Townsend, Washington

I've had a bit of trouble getting into Blogger the last few days -- I kept getting a page that told me I had to have Cookies enabled (they were) and then listed several tweaks to play with to try to fix the problem. I fiddled with settings and the cache. Nothing. So I decided to delete all my google cookies, and voila! Access again. I did notice that I had a cookie from Google.CA (Canada) which I suspect was the culprit.

In the last blog, we had just left Hyder, AK in the middle of a torrential downpour. The next day at 8 AM the single road out of Hyder/Stewart was closed, the rain eventually washing out a bridge and tearing out huge hunks of the roadbed. The time span until reopening? Unknown. About 16 tourist rigs were stranded, but they eventually were rescued when supply barges were sent in by sea, and their RVs put on the barges for the return trip. The road just recently reopened, sort-of -- there is only one lane open, and only 2 or 3 trips per day are allowed, tagging behind a "follow me" vehicle. We just barely missed being stranded there, too.

We were glad to get back to the U.S.A, although we did have a 50 minute wait at the border. Once we made it to the agent, we passed through in record time. On to the State of Washington!

Northwestern Washington is a beautiful, watery, hippyesque place with lots of muffins and coffee, coffee, coffee. One of our favorite towns was Port Townsend, self-described as a Victorian Seaport and Arts Community. Old historic buildings, friendly people, and lots of artsy-fartsy interesting shops were everywhere.

The first thing you may notice about the town is a huge cloud of steam rising above the skyline. This is a paper mill near the water:

Our "lunch" was eaten in a 1950s cafe with a juke box that still played 45s, a soda fountain that served phosphates and egg creams, and a hispanic waitress who seemed very out of place but was extremely nice. John had a banana split, and I had a turtle sundae:

They apparently have some customers who aren't clear about those new fangled Seat-Cover-Thingies:

The town has a lot of docks lining the waterfront:

And people go to the parks for walking, biking, or photo sessions:

They had a "Speakers Corner," where this fellow was speaking to passersby. We expected a a religious message -- but we got instead the glories of Freedom of Speech!

Art was predominantly placed on the street:

And our favorite browsing store was this antique auto supply store -- headlights, mirrors, manuals, and all sorts of miscellaneous parts for antique cars were for sale, along with some antique cars:

When we had first reached the town, we had parked at a two hour meter just as the tire chalker/ticket writer was approaching our car. We stopped to chat, and he asked us about our domicile in Texas. When we left, he told us not to worry about the time -- he would make sure that our car was not ticketed or towed. How nice is that! We found all of Port Townsend to be a colorful, fun, and friendly place to stop for the afternoon. And we did make it back in just under 2 hours.