Tillamook Creamery in Tillamook, Oregon
Mmmm cheese. In Frankie's fantasy world, the four basic food groups are: meat, potatoes, bread and cheese. I arrive at the Tillamook Creamery bright and early after passing field after field of spotted cows. Even the pungent manure smell isn't so bad. Reminds me of home (home being a relative term: Texas and Ohio). The creamery is a huge blue and white Ikea-like building right outside of town (plenty of parking for you RV-ers!). There are several gift shops inside selling unique items, but also the goodies - ice cream and cheese from the cow's milk and beef jerky and sausages for when Bessie just isn't producing like she used to.

Wandering upstairs, the second-floor area has another ice cream parlor (which was closed), some historical Tillamook Cheese items and it looks out over two different rooms of the creamery - one with huge giant vats and another room where the cheese is chopped into chunks and then wrapped in plastic. All the workers are dressed in white with shower caps on their heads and plastic booties on their feet. Kinda reminds me of watching the Oompa Loompas working.

Where are the cows, though? This is it? I was hoping to see some nice glossy black and white cows here. Full of long eyelashes and wet noses and smelling like hay. Going back downstairs to the gift shop, I make sure to load up on the free samples while waiting to ask the cashier about the cows.

"Where are the cows?" I ask.

"What cows?"

Feeling like Pee Wee asking where the basement to the Alamo is, I stammer, "Um, this is a creamery. Don't you have some cows on exhibit?"

"Uh, no," she says, looking eeriely like this snotty girl I went to high school with.

Turns out the cows aren't housed here. Not even an old one stuck in a pen for kids to pet. Rats. I suppose I could've stopped at one of the many fields around here and tried to pet a cow, but it's just not the same thing, y'know?

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