The Exhausted Dad: A cheese factory and a dancing banana

You can’t expect relaxation on a vacation with four kids. While achievable, the effort required often turns “feeling relaxed” into “being too tired to move.”

With a family full of neurodivergent personalities (parents included), we also contend with various challenges that turn events as simple as “try free cheese” into a half-day of turmoil.

I’ve visited the Tillamook Cheese Factory in Oregon several times over the years, including with my kids. The two most recent visits, however, have led me to conclude that 1) There are too many people visiting a cheese factory in the middle of the week and 2) My family is perfectly fine obtaining our dairy products from a regular grocery store.

If you haven’t been to Tillamook in recent years, you should know they’ve remodeled the place to make it more of a tourist destination. The factory itself and the public viewing area of the factory are basically unchanged. The biggest addition is an expansive food court and ice cream stand, plus more space in the gift shop.

It’s all very fancy looking, but frankly, I don’t want a trip to the cheese factory to resemble a typical Disney attraction, complete with endless lines and distant overflow parking.

Anyway, the Wilson clan didn’t make it very long in the cheese factory. We had a 10-minute walk from the car to the entrance where all the kids acted like the normal smell of cows was some sort of Airborne Toxic Event. The facility itself was crammed with people. Forget waiting in line for ice cream; we had to wait in a line just to look at the cheese-making machines (I don’t read the educational signage, obviously). After being bumped into by at least 60-or-so RV enthusiasts, I needed to find some open space.

My oldest daughter also felt overwhelmed, which is saying something because she just spent a year in the sixth grade. She followed me as I left to find some quiet corner, abandoning my wife to deal with the two bickering middle children, who kept blaming each other for strangers bumping into them.

A few minutes passed before my wife finally bailed on the self-guided tour. The middles never stopped bickering, and our youngest, 6, had made the controversial decision to stop using his feet.

The hustle-and-bustle of the cheese factory is just too much for some families. It chewed us up and spit us out like deformed curd.

Fortunately, our family knows how to pivot. Some McDonald's for lunch, the promise of Tillamook ice cream already sitting in the freezer of our vacation rental and a mellow train ride along the coastline to Rockaway Beach. The disastrous cheese factory stop became a distant memory.

We drove through Tillamook again that evening as we began an hour drive back to the rental house. Even though we drove past the factory 25 minutes past closing time, it still seemed like thousands of people were still in the parking lot.

We also drove through the middle of town, where my 6-year-old son began to shout with excitement.

Him: “Hey, I just saw a banana dancing down the street!”

Everyone in the car was puzzled. At first, I assumed he saw a billboard I didn’t notice, or maybe a sign in a store window. Or maybe, as 6-year-olds tend to do, he made up some crazy scenario to get a laugh from one of his siblings.

Me: “What do you mean you saw a banana dancing down the street?”

The 6-year-old: “I mean that I saw a banana dancing down the street!”

His 12-year-old sister: “Really? Or is this from a show?”

The 6-year-old: “I don’t know how else to say it! A. Banana. Was. Dancing. Down. The. Street.”

To my surprise, my wife, who was driving at the time, immediately darted the van into a random parking lot to turn around and head back toward the location of his sighting.

My wife: “If he says he saw a banana dancing in the street, then I want to see it.”

We drove back, and behold! We noticed a bright-yellow figure skipping down the sidewalk. I pulled out my phone to record the moment. As we approached, the figure became crystal clear: It was a banana dancing down the street.

OK, so it was some crazy-looking dude wearing a banana costume walking down the street. Close enough.

We honked, waved and cheered as we passed him, then turned back around to head back to our rental, and honked, waved and cheered the banana man on as we passed him a second time.

The 6-year-old: “I told you! Why would I make up a banana dancing down the street?”

We had lots of fun and saw many beautiful sights on our trip to the Oregon coast. Nothing tops the dancing banana. Oh, and the Tillamook ice cream was on sale at the grocery store a block from our rental.

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Tyler Wilson is a freelance writer, full-time student and parent to four kids, ages 6-12. He can be reached at twilson@cdapress.com.