All would agree that I am a gentleman of modest, humble ways in all parts of life. So you can imagine how it pains me to turn the spotlight on myself. But I’ve discovered what must be very nearly the perfect early date, and disclosing it is more public service than self-aggrandizement.

Check my thinking here: a date should, ideally, be something that you want to do anyway so that if it is a washout on the relationship side, you can say, “well, at least I got to see that movie I’ve been wanting to catch.” It should involve almost-but-not-quite embarrassingly long stretches of time for you to talk so she has a chance to work in an explanation for the vestigial tail and I can explain my theory about how convicted but overturned on appeal equals innocent.

An early date should be something fun that is at least a little bit surprising: helping to clean up an oil spill would be an excellent date. And the hallmark of every great date, going all the way back to Lancelot and , is cheese. Whether you’re nibbling it on crackers with wine or having it with nachos, all dating sociologists agree that you don’t actually get credit for a date that doesn’t involve solidified milk and mold at some point.

For the ladies, this is why most guys carry little tubes of Cheez Whiz in their pockets on dates. Insurance.

Anyway, while we were out a few weeks back on our Oregon adventuring, we were drawn to the Tillamook Cheese factory, as one inevitably is once you cross the border into Oregon. (Inevitable is used here in the little-known tertiary meaning of “wresting the steering wheel away from your traveling companion and insisting despite her extreme reservations.” It’s in the OED. You can check it. First appeared in print in 1839 in The Bostonian times, “the whole family was inevitably led West to pursue the father’s dreams of wealth through llama ranching.”)

And it was every bit as wonderful as I remembered from my youth! Even without having visited the jerky outlet mall beforehand! It is truly an attraction that stands on its own.

You walk in to the factory and can tell right away by the enormous gift shop that greets you that you are in a professional-type attraction. And educational plaques line the walls telling you all about Tillamook county and its wonderful temperatures and rainfalls and so forth. Then there’s the huge plastic cow in front of a TV screen surrounded by benches where presumably something happens sometime, but wasn’t happening when we were there.

But all that is just prelude to walking upstairs to the observation deck where you can watch the cheesepeople at work tending the cheese machinery. The room is full of spinning robot arms, conveyor belts, machines blowing air to slip cheese into bags and machines making a vacuum to seal the bags. Enormous fifty-pound cubes of cheese that remind you of the Borg come rolling out of the wings to be sliced progressively into the two and five pound logs that we buy at the store.

There is so much cheese and so much activity centering around nothing but endless supplies of cheese. It's surreal.

Everyone wears hairnets, and the men with facial hair wear plastic beardnets. And when there’s an accident and some cheese accidentally becomes impaled on the machinery, it’s wonderful to see that one man has the power to stop the entire production line when he eventually notices that several hundred cheese blocks have piled up in the overflow trash bin.

When eventually you tire of watching the machinery and the people and the enormous cheese-making vats (generally by the following Thursday), you can wander back downstairs where you are led into a wonderful huge store of cheese and cow-related products plus a completely bonus monster selection of candy for the kids.

At the entrance is a world of cheese samples. Platters galore of various cheeses and toothpicks with which to stab them.

Then you can buy Tillamook ice cream, Tillamook belt buckles, and so on and so forth, finally settling into one of about a thousand tables with your bags of goodies and your ice cream cone in hand and look out the window and chat and lick. Followed by a nice long drive home in the gathering dusk.

Tell me that is not the perfect date. And it's practically right in our own back yard, the hidden treasure of our lumberjack neighbors to the south.