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Published: February 21st 2008
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Obfuscator writes: The last part of our stay in Seattle was a bit less eventful than the first part. We began to feel as if we had already done most of what we wanted to do around Seattle, and that we were able to do in day-trips. We did still however, have tickets for a few places, and a few options on the table. First on our list was the Boeing Museum of Flight.
The Boeing Museum of Flight is quite extensive. I guess this shouldn't come as any huge surprise, considering the company, but they by no means limit themselves to Boeing products. They have on display planes from the Wright Flier to Space Ship One (many of which are replicas). There is an entire wing of the museum with just WWI and WWII fighters. The WWI fighters were particularly interesting to me, since my knowledge of them was otherwise quite limited. I had no idea, for instance, that the vast majority of fighters used by American pilots in the war were French designs and French built.
The Museum also has some other distinctive exhibits that are worth taking in. They have a Concorde on display that you
can walk through. Being the only supersonic passenger jet ever made, it's rather interesting, even if it doesn't look all that different from other airliners on the inside. They also have one of the jets that used to be used as Air Force One, and you can go inside that one too. You get to see the Presidential suite, where Johnson had his own fake temperature controls. Apparently he constantly was fiddling with the thermostat, and it drove everyone crazy, so they rigged up a personal control in his suite, but that wasn't actually hooked up to anything, sort of like you would a little kid. Another piece of random Presidential trivia associated with Air Force One: When Eisenhower flew into the Soviet Union, the Air Force attached a complete hidden surveillance package to the underside of the jet, without telling the President!
Lastly, they've got an SR-71 complete with drone. This was extremely educational for us, since we had long heard conflicting information about the existence of SR-71s with drones. A lot of fairly reliable sources had told us that they never existed. As it turns out, both were sort of right. The SR-71 with drone was experimented
with in the 60's, but nothing really came of it, because one of the two SR-71s thus built was destroyed when its drone lost control and collided with the mothership. That effectively signaled the end of the experimental program, and so the unit in the Boeing Museum is the last one of its type. We spent an entire day in this museum, and still hadn't seen everything. We could pretty easily have spent another half a day there.
A couple of days later, we hit up the Woodland Park Zoo in Seattle, the last of the attractions we had included in the CityPass. The Zoo is large and nicely done. They have a nice collection of big cats, including a pair of lions, a siberian tiger, some jaguars, an ocelot, and some others that escape me. There's also a variety of bears, wolves, primates, and reptiles, like you might expect. The two or three komodo dragons were pretty impressive. Their animals were also a fair amount more animated than I've seen in many zoos. We actually got to hear some vocalizations from the lions, and a lot of the animals were moving around more than I'm used to.
We spent a day, and took the ferry across Puget Sound to the Kitsap Peninsula so we could visit Olympic National Park. We took the dogs with us, hoping to get them on some big hikes. We were a bit disappointed to learn when we got there that dogs weren't allowed on any of the trails in the National Park. We were also a bit disappointed to learn that most of the park was in fact closed anyway, due to massive snowfall and melt in the mountains. We did, however, get to go to a couple of pretty waterfalls around Crescent Lake, and it was pretty. On the way back, we stopped at the Dungeness Recreation Area, where the dogs were permitted on the trails. That allowed us to take them on a nice long walk along the shore and bluffs of the Sound, which was pretty cool. We took a slightly different route home, which allowed us to take an evening ferry directly into downtown Seattle. The city looked really pretty from the water, all lit up at night, and I think we were glad for the detour.
We also managed to fit in another trip back to
the cemetery at Volunteer Park, where we were finally able to locate the graves of Bruce and Brandon Lee!
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