Day Three in Seattle: The Museum of Flight and Underground

My last day in Seattle started with a half-hour bus journey South of the city to visit the Museum of Flight. That is built on the site of the original Boeing factory (a converted barn!) and has some stunning planes on display and other exhibits. Some of the highlights are the last British Airways Concorde flown, a previous presidential jet (a 737, the first jet used as Air Force One), the first 747, the first 737, a Blackbird spy plane (the fastest aeroplane ever built), a moon rover, Mars explorer, space capsule, a recreation of the original Wright flyer and much, much more (clicking on any of the photos below will enlarge them).


Recreation of the Wright Flyer (note the Russian satellite hanging in the background too).


An elderly Air Force One!


The first 747 (note the large "1"!).


An Apollo Capsule.


The Blackbird spy plane (note the unmanned drone mounted on top too).


A recreation of the original Boeing factory in the barn.


The original factory from the outside.

I finally managed to drag myself away from there at about 3:00 in the afternoon and got back into Seattle just in time to take an "underground" tour. In the early part of the last century the city had been having a lot of trouble with its drains (mainly thanks to the recent introduction of indoor plumbing!). At that time a bad fire razed most of the town to the ground and offered an opportunity to fix the problems. Needless to say the townspeople and the city officials differed on just about every aspect of how this should be done, which led to the merchants rebuilding their shops at the (old) ground level while the city eventually rebuilt the roads one-storey higher! The result was that shoppers had to negotiate ladders to get down from the road level to the level of the pavement/sidewalk, and that incautiously driven carts sometimes ended up falling off the roads (as did incautiously inebriated citizens at night!). The eventual solution was to cover over the sidewalks, making the street level of the shops what was previously the first floor and introducing underground tunnels around each block. The underground tour went through a few of these tunnels, giving some of the history of the area with a great deal of tongue-in-cheek humour, (and not a little toilet humour given the cause of the problems!).

After a brief rest, I went out and got one last cache for my visit to Seattle. That was in the area of the Seattle Public Library, which was right across the road from my hotel (I could see the cache site from my hotel-room window!). The Library is interesting for its stunning architecture (I remember reading about it in Time magazine when it was opened a few years ago). That was followed by a meal of fresh fish and chips on the waterfront, watching the sun set and the seagulls stealing food from people eating on the dock outside the restaurant! A very memorable end to a great break.