If anyone’s coming to the Ashland/Grants Pass area, let me know. I’m a second-generation Ashlander (living in Medford now). I can show you a nice mountain bike trail or something.
I don’t have any suggestions for the OP that haven’t been mentioned yet, but if there’s enough interest, I might tell the story of my job x-raying cheese at the Tillamook Cheese Factory…
I’d love to hear it. I’m a cheesehead from way back, my father grew up in a cheese factory (literally. You think your grandparent’s house smelled funny?), my aunt just retired from working at another one, and I buy my curds within 24 hours of their creation. So do tell!
old joke:
If you want to get away from seedy motels and tacky souvenir stands go to Seaside…
…Anywhere you go from there will be away from seedy motels and tacky souvenir stands.
All my suggestions have been taken, but I especially recommend walking barefoot on Canon Beach, perhaps while flying a kite.
The tidal pools in that area simply too cool for words. Try to see them during low tide, of course.
Yeah - Ocean kite flying was a revelation on a trip out there, years ago. If you cross the mouth of the Colombia at Astoria on 101, you’re not far from Long beach WA, which, although also really full of tacky touristy stuff, is apparently something of a mecca for ocean kites.
That doesn’t mean that you can’t pick up all the same stuff in Seaside - simply don’t know.
One of the best omelets I’ve ever had in my life was at a diner in Tillamook, made with Tillamook cheese and local seafood. Yum.
The Rogue brewery wasn’t in Newport last time I was there, dammit… otherwise I might have had to extend my stay. Rogue Mocha Porter and Rogue Dead Guy Ale are both great (IMHO, of course…)
My sister married a man from Tillamook, and after a few years, they moved up there and she got a job in the accounting department of the cheese factory. One day she called and asked if I was interested in coming up to visit for a couple weeks, with a temporary job. (I was unemployed at the time.)
It turned out that at the factory that provided the salt for Tillamook Cheese, some kind of filter screen had broken, putting little bits of wire into the salt. It wasn’t noticed until the salt had already been made into a batch of medium cheddar.
Rather than throw out all that cheese, they brought an airport-style x-ray machine into the warehouse, and had people running cheese through it day and night. It was mostly two-pound blocks. We’d dump out the cases, put the cheese on the conveyor belt two by two as fast as we could, then re-pack the cases at the other end. We’d have to switch who was loading the belt pretty often, because our hands got sore. A pair of two-pound bricks is probably six inches wide, which is a pretty big stretch for some hands.
The crew was a motley assortment of misfits, which is probably normal for people recruited for a two-week manual-labor job. There was an ex-prostitute, a man with a glass eye, a teenage girl who looked like a pre-teen boy…
Here’s a slice of small-town life: One night as I was walking from the factory back to town after midnight, a cop pulled over to see what was going on. I told him my brother-in-law’s name, and he drove me to their house without needing the address.
Respectful disagreement–I thought it was way not worth fourteen bucks or whatever it was, to stand in a cave and look at a million barking sea lions. Mildly entertaining, but not worth the money.
Hooray for Oregon!
I’m told the Astoria Column is closed this summer for renovations. Otherwise, it’s only a dollar to climb to the top.