July 2016 - Seattle
We spent a weekend up in Seattle to visit some friends and check out the Pacific Northwest. Besides seeing the city, we also had a chance to go crabbing off of Bainbridge Island (first time - but no success); to see this fascinating animal park where you drive through and feed bread to various animals ranging from peacocks to bears; to hike a little at the edge of the Olympic mountain range; and to visit Boeing's Museum of Flight. The museum was actually really cool, there are a number of airplanes that they let you actually go up inside, which included an older Air Force One and a Concorde. Really awesome!
We spent a weekend up in Seattle to visit some friends and check out the Pacific Northwest. Besides seeing the city, we also had a chance to go crabbing off of Bainbridge Island (first time - but no success); to see this fascinating animal park where you drive through and feed bread to various animals ranging from peacocks to bears; to hike a little at the edge of the Olympic mountain range; and to visit Boeing's Museum of Flight. The museum was actually really cool, there are a number of airplanes that they let you actually go up inside, which included an older Air Force One and a Concorde. Really awesome!
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| Seattle appearing through the fog | A clearer view later in the day | |
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| Mt. Rainier is _enormous_. | ||
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| Pike's Place Market | ||
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| The super weird EMP museum | Up close at the space needle | |
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| Downtown from the top of the space needle, with Mt. Rainier in the back | Looking across the sound to Bainbridge Island and the Olympics | The view from our downtown hotel. It's fun to stay in a skyscraper! |
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| The Seattle Public Library | Inside the library, I _love_ all of the light | A last look at the city from our late lunch before driving down towards the airport |
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| Out for a sail (well, a motor) | Pulling up the crab pots... just a couple of little ones only good for throwing back | A beautiful house on its own little island, accessible with a walking bridge |
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| Feeding animals from the car. What an idea! | A really hairy cow | |
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| A big snuggly teddy bear | Near the end were the bison - the biggest, most aggressive animals and the scariest part of the drive | |
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| A bison's big nasty tongue | The Dosewallips fall | The base of the fall |
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| A garter snake relaxing on the mountainside | The Dosewalips river, in the thick of the forest | |
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| The water had a really beautiful slate color to it | Nearly constant rain yields a really green forest | |
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| Mt. Rainier in the backdrop | A room full of WWII airplanes | One of my all-time favs, the spitfire |
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| Ready to fit on the carrier - or in the smallish museum | Nothing says WWI like a Fokker triplane! | A Spad XIII |
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| Another room full of airplanes | Me and the SR71 | A special SR71 that had a prototype drone attached to its back. Back before drones were cool. |
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| The pinocchio jet | One of the worst ideas ever taken to functioning prototype: The car-plane | Hanging out in the cockpit of a jet |
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| In an SR71 cockpit. Awesome. | ||
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| A lunar buggy | Me crashing the space shuttle during the simulated landing | Inside the training shuttle bay |
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| A thoroughly scorched reentry capsule. Makes it seem pretty terrifying. | Me and Air Force One, as used in the 60s and 70s | Inside Air Force One |
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| The meeting room | The royal toilet | The communications room |
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| The cockpit | Coming out | An open-air hanger with the jumbojets |
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| A classic B17 | Being sucked into a 747's turbine | A Tomcat, which looks tiny compared to the 747 |
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| A Concorde - that you can actually go inside! | The sleek wing | Inside the Concorde |
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| The cockpit | Mt. Rainier from our non-supersonic airplane | |