Trip Report: Tillamook to Quinault, WA

Tillamook Cheese Factory to Quinault Rain Forest



The start of this album was our trip to the cheese factory. They had samples out that were delicious and we bought a block of smoked white cheddar, peppercorn cheddar, and garlic cheddar and had cheese and crackers, cheese burgers, cheese and hashbrowns - and pretty much put cheese on anything else we could think of during the trip. :D It was delicious! The other delicious thing about the cheese factory was their selection of 38 freshly made flavors of icecream! We had a 5 scoops sampler at 10 in the morning: marionberry, chocolate peanutbutter, vanilla toffee, lemon blueberry pie, and udderly chocolate. They were all amazing and our biggest regret from the entire trip was not going back for a second bowl to try more flavors! :D

After checking out Tillamook (see video of cheddar being made at the factory here), we drove up the coastal highway of 101 to Canon Beach where we stopped to take pics of Haystack Rock. It is the most photographed site in Oregon (according to some literature) but since it was windy and cold , we snapped some pictures and remained generally unimpressed. But it was nice to stretch our legs before starting the long hall up to Washington. The coastal highway was beautiful. We left the plains and water of the Willamette Valley (I felt like I finally won that silly Commadore 64 game from my childhood - Oregon Trail) and headed in towards the rainforests of Washington.

The most southern rainforest is Quinault. The plan had been to camp along the south shore of Lake Quinault in one of the several campgrounds. Unfortunately, I had not been clear enough in my preparation - the campgrounds were all National FOREST service, not NPS - so they wouldn't open for one more day. But owners of an RV campground took pity on us, gave us a discount, and let us pitch our tent off to the side of one of the gravel drives. The site had no picnic tables, so Brett used the concrete parking block as a table and we had our first camping beers (a Taylor tradition) while sitting by the world's largest spruce tree and eating hamburger with mac and cheese and bemoaning the "no campfires" sign. After dinner we went for a short hike to one of the nearby waterfalls. The rainforest doesn't get as much rain as others but I still spent the entire hike marveling at the size of the trees.

Link to pics here.
And the movie here.