The hows of air travel…

A couple of days ago we did our aerobic exercise by walking up hill and down dale in downtown Seattle. Actually we walked down Pike and up Seneca and boy, was it indeed way down to the waterfront, including a stroll down the Pike Hill Climb—there actually was a sign!—all the way to the harbor and then back up. The hotel valet warned us not to go downhill, but we ignored his advice. Got our 10,000 steps!

Today we managed to fritter away the whole morning in Seattle by doing…well, we don’t exactly know what we did, but pretty soon it was 11am and we needed to get to the Hotel Deca (our home for the next 7 nights) so we could catch the tour that the Renaissance Hotel set up for us to Boeing (Paine Field). As in airplanes, as in “If it’s not Boeing, I’m not going!”

Somehow the brochure about the tour made us feel as if we needed to have this escorted tour if we wanted to see how Boeing makes its airplanes. We didn’t and we could have saved ourselves a bunch of money if we just drove ourselves to Paine Field, but then we wouldn’t have had the experience of riding a bus as the only passengers with a very entertaining man (Greg) doing a lot of talking on our way up and back to Everett, WA (the home of Paine Field and the construction of 747s, 767s, 777s, and 787s). We learned a lot of very forgettable stuff—but very interesting, forgettable stuff!—about Bill Boeing on our way up to Everett. And the driver learned that a 247 is NOT a pressurized airplane. He’ll probably forget that.

The tour itself was absolutely fascinating! We have no pictures because we were not allowed to bring a purse, backpack, fannypack (for any Aussie or Kiwi readers, that’s not a bad word, it’s a bum bag) anything electronic or mechanical with us on the tour unless, as Greg-our-guide said, it ran our pacemakers or opened our car. So, off to the (for a dollar) lockers.

We watched a short movie, the quality of which rivaled the best Hollywood production (if that production was only six minutes long, that is) then out to the busses for the fairly short drive past the DreamLifter and dozens of 7xx airplanes in various states of paintedness to The Building. I call it The Building because it is just so BIG! Actually it is the largest (by volume) building in the world; Greg-the-guide said it could hold five Empire State buildings, or two and a half pentagons, or the whole of Disneyland Anaheim and still have 12 acres left over for covered parking.

We watched 747s, 777s, and 787s being built, the 787s on a moving assembly line. Pretty cool!