Flights and Flights

The Tuesday of our Seattle trip was "get out of the city day." We drove north up to Everett to the Boeing factory (specifically, their Future of Flight Aviation Center & Boeing Tour). This is the location where they assemble several wide-body planes, including the 747, 777, and 787.

You get to see a lot of the process on the roughly 90-minute tour. What you don't get to do is take a lot of pictures, as they make you leave behind cellphones (and bags, and anything else that could drop several stories off a balcony and onto the factory floor). There are YouTube videos you can watch, time-lapse looks at the construction of each plane type, but it scarcely does the place justice.

The building is immense, and when you ride the freight elevator up to observation and look out, there's something almost fake about it. It's partly like the way being inside a Borg cube is depicted on Star Trek, in that you can just see endlessly through row after row of ordered scaffolding and machinery. It's partly like looking at a bad matte painting in an older movie, because you can see so far in one direction that it actually begins to look like a painting to your wonderstruck eye. (I've only had that experience one other time, looking across the Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone.) It's really something you've got to see for yourself, and if you ever have the chance, I definitely recommend that you do.

I do have one great photo, though, that I happened to catch as we were driving away. Our tour guide had explained that parts of the company's newest plane, the 787, are actually made at another site. ("Baked," in a sense -- they're made of carbon fiber.) They're then flown to the Everett location in one of four dedicated cargo planes, for final assembly there. The timing just happened to be that one of those planes was crossing the highway to land, right in front of us, as we were leaving the place. Neat.

From there, we drove about halfway back to our hotel, to Woodinville, to the state's concentration of wineries. The grapes in Washington are all grown east of the mountains, but for some reason (to get close to day trippers from Seattle, I'd imagine), they're brought west to Woodinville for blending and fermentation. So we hit up a couple of wineries -- actually right across the street from one another -- Chateau Ste. Michelle and Columbia. We did take a short tour at Chateau Ste. Michelle, but it was a bit underwhelming -- both in comparison to a tour we'd taken years before in Napa Valley, and for the fact that they weren't actively making or bottling anything at the moment. (It wasn't the right time in the season.) Still, both locations were lovely, the wine flights were great, and we picked up a couple of "souvenir" bottles to later remind us of the visit.

We might have had it in our heads to hit a few more wineries (there are dozens in the area), but it gets to your head fast, even at sea level. So our last stop in Woodinville was a craft brewery instead. Dirty Bucket may not be the most appealing name, but the beer was solid across the board. And the people were quite outgoing. That would be the bartender, and one of the locals who drank from his "mug club" mug. The latter immediately read the relationship between me and my husband and proceeded to explain the extreme left politics of King County, recommend places we might visit, and finally announce it was time to get "home to the wife."

It was seafood again for dinner, though that night we went to The Crab Pot. They just bring you a bucket of stuff, a mallet and a tool for cracking crab legs, and let you go to work. (Or "make" you go to work depending on your perspective. They didn't even do preparation on the shrimp.)

Tired and full, we settled down for the evening with one more full day to go.