June 21 - 22, 2024 - Lafe and Faith's Odyssey

Cheese and Chip

When we awoke to the morning light, there was no sun: we were still enveloped in mists. We descended back down the mountain and out of the clouds into Tillamook. My company has an office in Tillamook, so I took advantage of the opportunity to get a tour of the facility. I got to meet and chat with a couple of the engineers and see their offices, labs, and equipment. I was very interested by it all, and they were likewise interested in our living arrangements, so we gave them a quick tour of the van. They had recommendations for a coffee shop, which was conveniently across the road from the creamery. We stayed there and worked/beaded for a while until the hour of our tour had arrived. We hopped across the highway and into the creamery. The tour didn’t provide any special access to the factory, but it did give us the chance to try some of their cheese curds and aged cheddars. The aged cheddars were all very good, but I wasn’t too big a fan of the cheese curds. When the tour guide asked if anyone had had specifically Wisconsin cheese before, I raised my hand, and she proceeded to ask which I liked better.

Me: “I think Wisconsin has better curds.”
Tour guide (visibly shocked): “Why do you think theirs are better?”

I briefly explained that I think the flavors and texture of Wisconsin cheese curds are better than Tillamook’s. She jokingly (I think) asked me to leave before continuing her explanation of why Tillamook’s cheese is supreme. Based on her reaction, I don’t think anyone had ever told her that someone else has a better cheese than Tillamook. After the tour, we got some more free samples, wandered around the store, then got some more free samples and left. We didn’t have anything planned, so we went back to Cape Mearas, found a pull off, then hiked to the lighthouse at the end of it. It was a beautiful hike through damp, old forest with huge trees and the sporadic cloudy mist. When we got back, it was dinner time, so we made some grilled cheese and tomatoes with our free samples. Similar to our first experience with the pancakes, we weren’t quite prepared and burnt most of our sandwiches. Even with the char, they tasted great. We hung out and enjoyed the evening before hunkering down for the night.

The next morning, we awoke to someone parking directly beside us even though there was plenty of space elsewhere in the pull off. This was apparently our sign to leave, so we got going down the road back into town. Today was a special day, it was the Tillamook Dairy Parade and the weekly farmer’s market. We stopped at the market and got some coffee and a couple cookies before finding a spot along the parade route to sit. A while later, along came the many floats, vehicles, and random groups in what was probably the longest parade I’ve ever seen: it took a solid three hours for the parade from start to finish. Additionally, this parade gave out the best gifts I’ve ever seen: they threw/handed out ice-cold chocolate milk, cheese samples, and beef sticks alongside the normal candy. We were blessed to receive a copious amount of all of the above, which made for a great if possibly unbalanced lunch meal. After the parade, we decided we had spent enough time in Tillamook and got back onto the road.

We stopped in Pacific City, which also has a Haystack Rock, though theirs is less cool than the Cannon Beach one. We stopped to wander around the beach and were soon approached by two young men. They asked us if either of us wanted to do the One Chip Challenge for $20. I said no and that it wasn’t worth it, but Faith agreed. The chip of the challenge is an incredibly spicy corn chip that has been wholly coated in various kinds of extremely hot pepper bits (e.g. Carolina Reaper, Naga Viper). The challenge was to eat the chip and not drink any water for 10 minutes. These two were trying to get their YouTube channel off the ground, and this was apparently a way to do so. They started recording, and Faith ate the chip. The main guy asked Faith some questions and inquired to the status of the heat. Faith explained that it was probably the hottest thing she had ever eaten, but you couldn’t tell if you looked at her. Faith took it like a champ, so well, in fact, that they cut off the timer at about seven minutes and gave her the $20 as she was clearly not displaying any disturbed affect. So, we continued down the beach slightly richer and hardly the worse for wear, or so we thought. As we headed back to the vehicle, Faith’s stomach started to bother her. It is important to note that this portion of the Oregon coast has little to no public offering of water, so we were down to the very end of our last water bottle. When we reached the car, Faith was holding back vomit, which she could only abate with a gulp of water before we were completely out. We zoomed down the road looking for water but soon had to pull over so Faith could use the bathroom. She calmed her stomach a bit with some water from the sink, but it wasn’t until we found a generous KOA that let us fill up that she was able to fully recover. She did make it two whole hours without water after eating the chip, but, like I said before, I’m not sure it was worth it.

We kept moving down the coast and though it now hardly merits mentioning, stopped at thrift stores and shops the whole way down. Ever since we reached the coast, Faith had a hankering for clam chowder, so we found a seafood restaurant and got fish tacos and clam strips that each came with chowder. The chowder was very good if a bit thick, and the tacos were great as well. I expected the clam strips to be sizable, but what appeared before me was essentially a pile of fried breading with bits of clam in the middle. Although somewhat disappointing, the food was good. We drove out of town a little ways up a steep, windy road into the mountains and found a lovely little pull off where we could watch the misty forest slowly become spookier as night fell. We played exactly one game of the card game War, which took a solid hour, then hit the hay as we had church to get to the next morning.