McMinnville and The Spruce Goose

So today we were up early so that Kathleen, Len and I could head to McMinnville to see the Spruce Goose. Dan was up earlier that we were because he had to head back to Vancouver to go to a doctor’s appointment. We headed up over Highway 26 and then south to McMinnville. It was still early enough that we decided to go and have a late breakfast and early lunch. We found a really cute place on Main Street called the Wild Wood Cafe. The inside is decorated with fifties chrome table and chairs, old style signs all over the walls and old fashioned hand beaters all over the ceiling. The food was excellent. They make their own homemade bread and jam. They have it in squeeze bottles right on the table. I had an omelette with fresh tomatoes and feta cheese. Len had the Wild Wood French toast which is their homemade bread, covered in granola and then French toasted and Kathleen had the home fries covered in bacon and cheese, needless to say that it was all very delicious and filling. After eating we headed to the Evergreen Aviation Museum which is where the Spruce Goose is housed. They have done some changes since we were there last time.

They have built a water park with a 747 on top of it, there are slides that go from the plane into the building. So they have the plane museum, the space museum, the IMAX theatre and a vineyard/winery, as well as the water park. They are also building a chapel and a hotel. They are making it a complete family vacation location.

We went through the air museum first, then went and watched a movie, which is included with your admission now and then we did the space museum. It is hard to get a complete picture of the Spruce Goose because it is so big. This is the front piece and three of the eight engines, four on each wing.

This picture is looking from the back, you can see the multiple planes that are positioned underneath it.

 This is the back tail, the span of the tail is wider than the span of a 747.

They had a few new exhibits like the Mars rovers and they moved the stealth SR-71 Blackbird to the Space section.

After going through the museums we did the four geocaches around the area and then slowly started to make our way back to Seaside. We stuck Len in the back seat because he doesn’t navigate fast enough when we are geocaching. We found a bunch on the way home and we found one just before we went for dinner. Tonight was our dinner at the Bigfoot. This restaurant has the best tasting prime rib I have ever had. It is so tender that you can literally cut it with a fork. It also comes with a medley of squash and I had the garlic mashed potatoes. Len also had the prime rib and Kathleen had linguine with pine nuts. It was so much she had to bring part of it back for lunch on her trip home.  So when we got back to the condo we decided to finish off the evening with a hot tub and some TV, however it was still very crowded with kids so Kathleen and I decided to do a late night cache before we went to bed. It was a puzzle cache that Kathleen figured out and the coordinates set us out towards the beach. We went outside in what can only be described as a very blustery storm. By the time we reached the cache area we were both soaked. We managed to find the cache in the second log we looked in and then headed back to the condo. When we got back inside we had to wake Len up so he could take a picture of us. We both look like drowned rats.