Oregon, Tillamook - Friday, August 17, 2018 - Tour of Tillamook

The Tillamook Cheese Company is the biggest tourist attraction along the Oregon coast.  Over 1.3 million visitors a year come through here.

The new visitor center just opened in June of this year and it is amazing.  There is no entrance fee, but it is going to cost you to get out because you are going to want ice cream!

In 1854 Tillamook farmers had butter and milk to sell – but hauling it over rough mountain roads took too long and it would spoil.  The fastest route to Portland is by water, so they built Oregon’s first official ship – the Morning Star – to carry their dairy goods to market.

By 1909 several small creameries joined together to make sure all cheese made in the Tillamook Valley was of the same high quality.  Each creamery contributed $10 to start the Tillamook County Creamery Association cooperative which is still going strong today.

In 1949 four of the local creameries joined together to build a new creamery on the spot of the current Tillamook Creamery.

Today tankers work all day long picking up milk from the local farmer-owned dairy farms like this one.

Each tanker holds 6,000 to 8,000 gallons of milk.  The creamery receives about 25 truckloads a day.  In less than 24 hours that milk is turned into cheese and ice cream.

Downstairs there is a deli on the left that serves breakfast, lunch and dinner.  If you want something lighter there is a yogurt bar and a coffee bar.  Ice cream is the focus on the right.

Looks like they are supporting a newcomer in the soft drink field – Stubborn soda was established in 2015.

There is seating inside and more outside.

This is where you can wait for your order when the rush is on.  Get here early!

The self-guided tour starts here.

Follow the hoof prints.

There is a hands on learning center.  Can you get a cow ready to milk in 21 seconds?

The story boards with videos show some pretty pampered cows on the local dairy farms.

The cow brushes keep the cows clean and give them a massage whenever they would like.  The Smart collars monitor cows’ activity and eating habits, a farmer can tell from the information on his phone if one of the cows is feeling “under the weather”.

The cheese making process is pretty well mechanized, two people are working this area.  This is where the milk comes into 8 cooking vats.  Cooking milk is separated into curds and whey.  The whey is turned into 82,000 pounds of sweet whey powder a day.  The whey powder is used in baby formula, protein drinks and health bars.

The curds go on to be made into 40# blocks that come out here where there are two more people working.  The blocks go into cold storage to age.

Once the cheese is aged it comes into this area to be cut and packaged.

Cheese tasting is also upstairs, it was hard to get a picture of the cheese tasting area while we waited and then when we got to the cheese, I had my hands full of samples so I couldn’t take pictures then.  Trust me, it is good.

Tillamook makes 170,000 pounds of cheese and 18,000 gallons of ice cream daily, working day and night.  Their other location in Boardman makes 300,000 pounds of cheese daily.

From the cheese tasting area you can get a good view of the market area downstairs.

We tried the ice cream before we left.  We can attest that the cherry and strawberry flavors are great!

There were two barns for the “Farm Experience” outside.  We had other stops to make today and felt we had had enough of the “farm experience” in our pasts so we passed these up.

The Tillamook Air Museum was our next stop.

In 1942 the U.S. Navy began construction of 17 wooden hangars around the U.S. coastline to house K-class blimps being used for anti-submarine coast patrol and convoy escort.  Two were built in Tillamook at a length of 1072 feet, height of 192 feet (over 15 stories) and a width of 296 feet.  Hangar A was destroyed in 1992 when 135,000 bales of straw that were stored in it caught fire.

The entrance fee is $9.00 per senior.

There are about 20 planes here in various stages of reconstruction.  I found the video of the history of the hangars and the buildings themselves to be more interesting than the planes.

Each hangar was built to house 8 K-class airships.

Each section of these doors (6 sections) weights 30 tons and rolls on railroad tracks.

Lighting inside isn’t good enough to get great pictures of the structure of the building.

One of the plane exhibits, a C-27A Spartan.

I’m not sure of the history on this small blimp.

I found this chart on blimp sizes interesting

The helium was stored and transferred here using this machinery.  Each airship needed 425,000 cubic feet of helium.

Outside we climbed into the belly of the “Mini Guppy”.

Unfortunately, once inside I took only one picture and it was blurry.  Basically, the inside is a very large empty space able to carry some unique cargo such as helicopters and the Pioneer 10 spacecraft which was used for exploration of Jupiter and the Asteroid Belt.

We stopped for lunch at the Blue Heron Cheese Company.

This was more of a retail shop although they did offer free wine and cheese tasting.  I think most of their cheese is imported, like French Brie, we didn’t do the cheese tasting, we were hungry for something more substantial.

The dining room furniture was a mixture of all kinds of tables and chairs – very interesting.

What else was interesting was their method of collecting payment.  You get a ticket at the deli when you order.  When you are done with lunch they trust that you will take your ticket to the cash register to pay.  If you want something to drink with lunch you get it out of the cooler and take the empty bottle with you to the cash register when you pay for lunch.  As busy as they were people could have just walked out, but they say the honor system works for them.

For the last stop of the day Greg opted to wait in the Jeep and let me explore the Latimer Quilt and Textile Center.

The building was originally the two-room Maple Leaf School.

In 2009 the Tillamook County Quilt Coalition was formed to honor local quilters and to encourage tourists to the area.  The first mural was painted in 2015 on one of the original coalition member buildings, the Latimer Center.

The Tillamook county Quilt Trail, patterned after the Ohio quilt Trail concept now numbers well over 100 blocks on buildings.  I’ve seen several of them in town.

Lots of quilts were on display.

One room had busy weavers.

My favorite of the exhibits was this quilting corn shuck doll.

They have a pretty extensive library.

The artist on display right now is Victor Pirtle.  I can’t say I am a fan, but his work is interesting.  This wall hanging is a facsimile of Van Gogh’s original painting “Starry Night”.  This work took a year and 6.5 miles of thread to make.  The asking price is $15,000.

The “Empire Hotel” is listed for $5,000.

He uses a lot of stitches in his quilting.

We are headed home over this unique cement bridge.