Day 31 Week 5

The Pacific North West. I travelled over to Oregon today. The coastline is very impressive. Very rugged in places but really pretty. It was good to see the ocean again. I have been land locked for quite awhile now. I started at the very top left or North Western corner at Astoria, intending to drive down highway 101 all the way to California but after about 130 miles I gave that away as a bad joke. It is a lovely drive with some nice scenery but there are literally 100’s of small towns all almost interlinking along this road. The average speed was about 30-40 mph. The road is very winding and hilly and lots of sets of traffic lights in the towns etc and it seemed to be taking forever to get anywhere.

 Waterfall

During the drive, I saw a hanger in the distance with the words AIR MUSEUM painted on the roof. I thought, well, I have to have a look at that. After a few minutes of driving straight at this hanger, it hadn’t seemed to have gotten any closer. It was then I realised how big this thing must be. It turned out to be the old Tillamook Naval Air Station built during WW2 to house blimps. This thing is HUGE. I mean HUUUUUGE!! I went inside and watched the mandatory movie that all these museums have and found out that due to steel shortages during the war, the whole framework for this building was made out of locally produced timber, there being no shortage of that around here. There had been two of these hangars up until the 1992 when a fire destroyed the second one. 17 of these timber blimp hangars were built and placed around the United States. There were about 12 fully airworthy planes in this hangar today and it still only took up the first half of it, with lots of room around them. The blimps that these hangers were built for used to patrol the coastal waters of Oregon and California on the lookout for Japanese submarines.

The timber framework is incredibly impressive.

The Cafe inside

Unfortunately, I am on the final leg of my adventure now. I am continuing down the west coast getting ever closer to LA. I will see what tomorrow brings.