Friday, September 5, 2013. Cheese, Glorious Cheese!

We spent the morning at the Tillamook Cheese Factory and Store. In the late 1800s, pioneer farmers showed up in this coastal county called Tillamook. They discovered that their usual agricultural crops did not thrive and the growing season was shorter than that to which they were accustomed; the best crop here was grass. They had lots of rain, 90” a year on the coast and up to 150” a year in the mountains. And they had milk cows. They had trouble shipping milk over rough roads, so they converted it to cheese. Ten of the farmers gathered together to create a cooperative cheese factory. This cooperative eventually had a boat built called the Morning Star to ship their cheese up to Seattle and to Portland. Tillamook is now the 44th largest cheese producer in North America. They have a large store selling cheese and a huge variety of related products.

We were able to watch some of the assembly line processes that included cutting, weighing, and packaging the cheese blocks both for aging and distribution. We imagined our family quality control authority, Polly, would have done a great job there (well, after she became accustomed to the differences between airplane components and cheese!)

Of course, cheese sampling was a hit with both of us, as usual. And we dropped a sizable amount on purchasing various goodies in the store. The Tillamook folks know a lot about marketing because we then had to stop at the on-site ice cream section to get a couple of scoops each. Chris was especially pleased to find a wide variety of no sugar added varieties, including a black cherry that he enjoyed! Thanks for thinking about the non-sugar crowd, Tillamook!

We continued down the coast and stopped two times. First we stopped at a Walgreens to refill a prescription for Kathy. That took 2 1/2 hours, at least! For part of that time we went to a nearby Goodwill store and browsed. OK, we also bought a few things... We drove a bit further and stopped to do laudry. Those two stops used up enough time that we didn't have time to visit the Oregon Coast Aquarium as planned, so we finished the evening at Lincoln City in the KOA near Devil's Lake.