Oregon Coast, Part the 1st

Off down the Pacific coast: Neat fallen tree next to our campsite - found art. The oregon coast - the mountails come right down to the sea; lots of windey roads...
And wind: they call these flag trees. The wind is always blowing.
Beautiful.
Sea anemone. Sitting there, looking all pretty and innocent, until some little critter gets close enough for it to grab and digest.

Kelp heads: The kelp are anchored to the bottom - where there are rocks - and the tops float like this. All sorts of fish and animals live in these beds: fish, shellfish, sea otters. etc. Sun worshippers: Pelicans mostly, but at the bottom, Harbor Seals

Never seen so many vertical rocks sticking straight up; They call them Sea Stacks

The seastacks are rocks of something called the Franciscan Melange - very hard rocks that remain standing after all the softer rock has been washed away.
Tillamook, Oregon -the Air Museum. This is a really big bird - adapted from a Boeing 707 especially to carry around parts of the Apollo Moonshot vehicles.

The museum is in a Blimp hangar. They built a bunch of these around the country, to house blimps that were used for antisubmarine patrols in World War II. As blimps are giant bags of gas with an engine and a cabin attached, you can guess the hangars would have to be big:
Picture when they were building them. Of the 17 blimp bases built around the country, there are only a couple of hangars left. There were two here, but one was used, after the war, to store 143,000 bales of hay, and it spontaneously combusted. Pretty spectacular fire, they say.

This is said to be the lrgest all wood building in the world (well, it does have 100 tons of steel in it, but the largest mostly-wood building).
There is a permanent colony of owls living in the hangar.
A blimp somebody built for fun --- wonder how many UFO reports this one generated

A target drone

Catalina flying boat. These were great for rescuing downed flyers,, and for supplying places where there was no runway.
A smaller amphibian, the Grumman Duck. Used a lot after the War.
World War I SPAD fighter - French made, but a lot of the Americans flew it. This has the 'Hat in a Ring' logo of Capt Eddie Rickenbacher's squadron.
Japanese Oscar fighter plane. There are very few of them left, since they used them for kamikaze missions toward the end of the War.

DC-3: perhaps the most successful airplane ever built. A workhorse way back before World War II; there are still some of them flying commercially, around the world.

Then, the Tillamook creamery. A cooperative.
The production floor. They gave us a lot of detail. There's a good deal to making cheese just right. One poster told us of an early farmer who made his own; occasionally the cheeses would explode.
Watch out, it might get you!
Now, that's a lot of cheese.
The mascot, or something.