The Tillamook Factory

Tillamook ice cream is some of the best ice cream you can buy at the supermarket, in my opinion, so we had to visit. When you get out of the car, the smell of cow hits you right in the face.

There are a lot of products you can buy. All these bright colors!

The cheese-making and -packaging processes are on full display.

We got to sample three of the cheeses—a sharp cheddar, a mild cheddar, and a mozzarella. I didn’t try the mozzarella, but I did taste both the cheddars. They were surprisingly bland. The ice cream, on the other hand, was pretty amazing.

Next: Portland.

The Devil’s Cauldron

Welcome to the Devil’s Cauldron—the one on the Oregon Coast, that is, not the one in Devonshire, UK; nor the one in Rio Verde, Ecuador, Ceredigian, Wales, or Nye County, Nevada.

Clarke’s Collectibles

We decided to stop in Nice, CA, to visit Clarke’s Collectibles, a museum of lunchboxes, toys, and similar kitsch. The owner, Deb Clarke, is about as nice a person as you’ll ever meet. As I looked around, I saw at least one lunchbox I’d had as a kid.

After our visit, we checked into the Featherbed Railroad B&B Resort. All the rooms are repurposed cabooses. I felt like I was on “The Wild, Wild West.”

Next: the Devil’s Cauldron.

Mendocino and the Digger-Hayes Tree

Mendocino: a cute coastal town in northern California. The city has done a good job of preserving its character, and the coastline has a lot of areas that look like they’d be nice for swimming if it weren’t so cold. (Apparently, I forgot to photograph the town’s distinctive wooden water towers.)

We went on a walking tour to learn about Mendocino’s history. At one point, a passerby—a young guy with a mullet—asked our tour guide if she’d shown us the Digger-Hayes tree, and at this, she became angry and flustered. It turns out that the guy hadn’t said “Digger-Hayes,” but rather something quite different.1 The town lost a fraction of its charm after that.

  1. As it happens, there is only one recorded lynching in all of Mendocino County, of three white men accused of stealing a saddle in 1879, and it happened in a different part of the county. ↩︎

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