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!