Matthew Tuffin Blog

flickrphoto: 

Source: Flickr

Source: Flickr

Source: Flickr

Since I now had the car I wanted to do a bit of driving so I would become accustomed to driving on the right hand side of the road. Looking at the various touristy things to do, I decided to have a Boeing day. Travelling to the far north of Seattle first to visit Boeing’s huge warehouse at Everett where they give guided tours from walkways above the main factory floor. You can see from the photos massive blue doors where all the finished aircraft will eventually emerge from. Sadly no photos are allowed to be taken on the tour itself; they don’t want their secrets reaching Airbus I would suspect. However there was a gallery allowing you to see some of the different parts of a Boeing aircraft up close.

The highlight of the tour was the ability to see the new Boeing 787 ‘DreamLiner’ being constructed and put together. The 787 a lighter, long range, more fuel efficient smaller aircraft capable of taking people great distances from small airport to small airport. No more travelling to large airport hubs.

Just after lunch I began travelling far south to Boeings other factory at Tukwila which houses the museum of flight. A journey that I originally estimated should have in my opinion only lasted about 30 minutes turned into a slow slog of slow moving traffic down the freeway. Apparently having asked a few people from Seattle that was not rush hour traffic for a Friday as I believe I had deduced but normal traffic on a typical weekday. When map directions list times to a destination make sure you take into account the time of arrival with traffic.

Arriving at the Museum of Flight at around 4pm I had little time to stop and read all the various plaques of information instead opting to stroll around quickly with camera in hand. I got to see various planes ranging from the failed supersonic passenger jet concord to a world war one sop with camel to the us air force’s 60s secret project sr-71 blackbird.

Being a Friday that night I could not close the day without going out for a few pints of the local bear. I found an Irish pub just further up the road in Redmond called JJ Mahoney’s. Sat down at the bar and started talk to a few of the locals about American politic differences and the ins and outs of life in Seattle. The pub was open until 2am but by about midnight the place was almost deserted with many people probably catching a ride into main Seattle to continue partying. Towards the end I got chatting with a guy who ran his own wine touring business in Woodinville valley. He offered to take me there and show me around for a few hours the next day.