Portland/Coast Trip

We wanted to go to Portland, and some friends of ours went to Portland, straight to the coast to where the Tillamook Cheese Factory resides, then drove up the coast back to Washington. We decided to copy them. It was my favorite trip of the summer. We left on a Friday and got back on a Sunday.

Driving...Dan found some siamese goldfish.

I have an even better picture of Dan than this one...where he has not one but two goldfish in each nostril, as well as a mouth overflowing with the little fish. But out of respect to his pride, I will not post it.

In Portland, we went to a flee market. It was pretty cool. I really liked these paintings.

The downside to Portland was that almost everywhere we went smelled like very potent urine.

Then we headed to the beach.

Feather in the sand which we decided marked where we should lay out our towels. After 10 minutes, we caught a whiff of death and noticed there was a decaying seagull nearby so we moved.

For dinner we went to a restaurant called something like "Bigfoot's Grill"....I can't remember. But like I said in my previous post, we're rather obsessed with the sasquatch and as such had another picture with this statue (although it's at a very poor angle).

The next day we went to the Tillamook Cheese Factory. It was awesome. During the tour there were samples of about 12 different types of cheese. They also had a cafe and they had delicious grilled cheese and mac & cheese (this mac & cheese was better than the "world's best" in Seattle). Here are some photos of the assembly line.

Close-up to show how huge the blocks of cheese were.

Packaging

After that we decided we wanted to hit up the beach once more. And I'm so glad we did, it was awesome! We went to this little beach called something like "Hug Beach" but I can't remember for sure...it had something to do with hugging. Anyways, at this beach we found an awesome little cave that was in the face of a cliff...highly reminded me of Voldemort's cave where he hid one of the horcruxes.

The cliff where the cave was. The cave in the picture is not the one we found...the one we found we had to walk out into the water around the edge of the cliff. At high tide the cave would be filled with water.

Dan was taking a picture of me. The water was extremely frigid and right as he snapped the picture, a small wave rushed in and caught me by surprise, hence the ridiculous expression upon my face.

Cool little barnacles on the cliff

Dan climbing up in the cliff

Voldemort's cave!!!

The cave even had it's own version of horcruxes in it. These nasty little mutant rolly-polly-cockroach-trilobite dudes. They were so freaking gross. The smallest ones looked like regular rolly-pollies and this picture is of the biggest one we saw. It was roughly the size of one of those pink hand-held erasers. SO gross.

I didn't realize til after I snapped the picture that these two were busy...haha.

Side story--these little nasties were crawling all over the walls and ceiling of the cave. I put my hood on in case one of them fell on my head. I have a huge phobia of having bugs in my hair, probably because once as a child I was swimming at a friend's house and a bee landed on my head, got tangled in my hair, and died there. Anyways, once we got out of the cave I took off my hood and asked Dan to check my hair to make sure I had no unwanted visitors. He told me I was good, but then quickly said, "OH MY GOSH. Wait. Hold still. There's a big one in there!" I was basically paralyzed with fear screaming things like, "Get it out! Use your fingers! Take your fingers and just pull it out! I don't care if you mess up my hair, GET IT OUT!!!" All the while Dan was digging around in my hair, saying very discomforting things like, "Whoa it's huge! It's digging its claws in! I can't get it out!" I really thought I was going to have a panic attack. Turns out there was NOTHING there after all, it was just a big joke. Grrr, Dan!

On the way back to Auburn, we passed/went across several bridges. Dan really loved them so I snapped a few picture of them. Again, I'm sorry for the crappy quality due to my camera.