Glassy Eyed

AFIELD TRIP:  Tuesday dawned another clear day, destined to be well over 80 - uncharacteristically hot for Seattle in April.

We dropped CJ off at his class at 9 on Queen Anne, and then Annabelle and I headed to Seattle Center for an art-related field trip to the Chihuly Garden and Glass. 

 There, we met a few dozen of other art students and their guardians for a tour of the museum. It started with a glass-blowing demonstration.

 Naturally, that involved some special tools and high temperatures. 

It also involved teamwork, as one artist tooled the material while another blew through the tube to help form it.

After the demo, we made our way into the gallery. Our first stop was the neon forest. It was so dark compared to the brilliant light outside, it made a few us us a bit dizzy!

 One gallery, Persian Ceiling, had a ceiling with wall to wall glass overhead. 

 Also overhead, the chandeliers were stunning.

Puget Sound was the inspiration for this mammoth glass sculpture in the Sealife Room.

 The Float Boats were a carnival of color.

 Mille Fiori was inspired by Dale Chihuly's mother's garden.

In the Macchia Forest, German-sourced colors were incorporated into Chihuly's glass, resulting in over 300 colors being used.

 The Glasshouse was phenomenal!

 And the gardens were divine!

We were fortunate to visit while the gardens (helped along by a mild winter and way warmer than normal spring) were in beautiful bloom.

Annabelle and friends took a moment in the garden to do some sketching.

I just took in the scenery.

 Apparently, I have a thing for the Space Needle.

You can take an audio tour of the museum at this link: http://www.chihulygardenandglass.com/m/tour/

Afterward, we headed over the great playground at Seattle Center for a few fun minutes.

Obviously, a busy and interesting Tuesday.

Trekkers

GOING COASTAL: We continue our look back to last week's adventures afield.  For a large part of our journey, we trekked down Highway 101, which often affords lovely views of the Pacific Ocean.

At the stop above, we learned that we have a gentleman named Oswald West to thank for access to the coastline in to perpetuity. 

A Democrat and the 14th governor of Oregon, West established Oregon's beach highway law, proclaiming the entire Pacific coastline to the high tide line to be a public highway, thereby preserving scenery and beach access for future generations.

What a swell thing to do, right? 

On the highway just south of Cannon Beach, we saw a number of monolithic rocks. Haystack Rock is the most famous and biggest. Below is a photo of one of the 'smaller' rocks, dotted with shore birds.

We read with great interest the tale of "Terrible Tille," a lighthouse built on one of the monoliths near Haystack Rock. 

Just barely visible in the photo below, the lighthouse was built on a chunk of basalt 1.2 miles offshore of Tillamook Head.

Conditions were treacherous and it took more than 575 days to build the lighthouse over 575 days, starting in 1879. 

The lighthouse was decommissioned in 1957. It got 'new life' in 1980, when it became a warehouse for cremains, but that license was revoked in 1999. Now "Terrible Tilly" just sits there on the monolith, with a few guests on board for all eternity.

Further down the highway, we arrived at the headquarters of Tillamook Cheese (and ice cream)!

 Many photo opps were on site. 

The view of the factory floor was super interesting. We stood and watched for several minutes. 

 After the factory view, we enjoyed some samples. 

Here's CJ's summary of our part of our adventure:

Recently, my family went on a road trip down to Siletz, Oregon, to see my grandparents. On the way there, we made several stops, One of which was in Tillamook, Oregon, home of the famous Tillamook Cheese Factory. Tillamook Dairy is a creamery, most well known for their cheese, with their cheddar variation being the 2nd best selling cheddar cheese brand in the world. The Cheese Factory contains a visitor center, where visitors can enter and begin a self-guided tour of the factory. The tour was relatively short, with the primary stop being windows where you could see two different parts of the cheese production process. In the first large room, the cheese ingredients were mixed together, with the curds being put together, and the excess liquid being removed from the tub. After binding, the curds would then be packed into 40-pound blocks, and sent to age in the warehouse.

After the cheese has significantly aged, the blocks get sent to the next room. In the second room, the cheese blocks would be cut into smaller blocks (the ones you see on the store shelf,) with small slices being cut off the top to be put into slice packets. The smaller blocks are then manually put into plastic packages, whereafter they go to a peculiar-looking "octopus" machine. According to a sign at the factory, the "octopus" looking vacuum sealers give each packet an airtight seal. Packages are run through a heat shrink tunnel, then pass through a metal detector for safety. The now-airtight cheese packages are then sent to the next room, unseen to people taking the self-guided tour.

I enjoyed my visit to the Tillamook Cheese Factory, and I recommend a visit for anybody travelling on the Oregon coast.

NEAR NEWPORT: On Wednesday, we reached Siletz, Oregon, home of beloved Nonnie and Bops. The grounds of their home were beautiful, as always. 

 Loved this fern seeming to emerge from a moss-covered tree trunk. 

 While checking out the orchard, we got a mini lesson in grafting. 

We headed back up to Seattle on Friday, stopping briefly in Puyallup for the Washington State Spring Fair. 

Good times. :)

Playing Catch Up

LOOK BACK: We were on the road all week last week, and posts were from my phone and not complete. I won't attempt to recount every stop we made or thing we learned, but will try to catch up on some of the highlights.

Monday night we spent at Dash Point State Park, in a cute little cabin. 

We did a little it of hiking there, in a forest along Puget Sound.

From there, we headed south to Seaside, via Astoria. We just *had* to stop at the lovely Dismal Nitch. 

An inhospitable spot on the north side of the Columbia River near its mouth to the Pacific Ocean, explorers Meriwether Lewis and William Clark spent a few miserable days here in 1805. While here, the bedraggled Corps of Discovery had run out of fresh food and their close were literally rotting off their backs. Ugh.  Winds here are take-your-breath-away strong.

The park gets its name from Clark's journal entry: "About 3 oClock the wind lulled and the river became calm, I had the canoes loaded in great haste and Set Out, from this dismal nitich where we have been confined for 6 days…"

From there, it was on to Oregon via the Astoria Bridge. The 4.1 mile-long bridge features a main span 1,232 feet in length, the longest "continuous truss" in the world.

Our quick stop in Astoria included a visit to The Arc arcade. What a great place! Dozens of the retro games we love, many of them set to free play!

We spent Tuesday night in Seaside, Ore., at the very-not-plush-but-clean-and-cheap City Center Motel.  It was a short block's walk to the beach - and the Seaside Aquarium! - from there.

Imagine our delight when we discovered a swingset right there on the beach!

 
We didn't enter the Seaside Aquarium, but we did ogle the gray whale skeleton in its window.

I'll let Annabelle tell you a bit more about our Seaside stop ...

Seaside has a beautiful beach. When we visited, the tide was very low. In the middle of the beach, they had a nice little swing-set that actually went fairly high. We noticed brown stuff in the water, but the aquarium next door let us know that this stuff wasn’t oil or sewage- it was something called a diatom! Diatoms are single cell plants that are related to plankton. They are a very important food source in the ocean that multiply in winter and early summer, which is why there was so much brown in the water. We didn’t go inside the aquarium, but they did have a window displaying multiple marine life skeletons such as a seal, a porpoise, and even a young grey whale! It was really pleasant and not windy, which is unusual for the Oregon Coast in April. It was fun being in Seaside.

We continued southbound, and found ourselves in Rockaway Beach eventually. We were cruising along at Highway 101 speed when our heads did a swivel at the sight of a ginormous corn dog atop a roadside restaurant.

Not only that, but I was pretty sure I saw an amusement ride on the north side of the place - a corn dog with a saddle. I ordered Christian to turn the car around!

Sure 'nuff, there was a coin operated corn dog! We scrounged up two quarters and the kids gave it a go.

Amazing. :)

Here's a short video of the corn dog rodeo ..
https://youtu.be/dfeQQ6UGiu0


And here's a short video about the establishment, which has only been open about a month ... 
https://youtu.be/zi_2Rp5SM8c