OREGON: TILLAMOOK STATE FOREST, TILLAMOOK CHEESE FACTORY, AND MR. BENTO

The first place we went after leaving the Portland Airport in our yellow Kia was to Tillamook, a small town of about 5,000 inhabitants located on the Pacific Coast just 75 miles from Portland. The city is named for a Native American tribe of the region.

To get there, we drove through the Tillamook State Forest, 364,000 acres of heavily wooded, fog-shrouded hills.

The point of our drive was this: The Tillamook Cheese Factory, the original cheese production site for the company. It gets over a million visitors a year.