After our overnight in Everett, we drove to nearby Mukilteo for a tour of the Boeing airliner factory and the Future of Flight museum, and then into Seattle for our tour of the archealogical digs of early city waterfront. Map.
The Boeing factory tour is very popular and is given approximately hourly every weekday. We made reservation for today and some time slots were full.
As could be anticipated, the tours are very well organized. We were bussed from the Future of Flight museum and gift shop to the "largest building in the world by volume". Sound familiar? A few days before we had seen the "largest tree in the world by volume". Unfortunately, photography was forbidden inside the building.
Our group was conducted by and lectured to by a young lady who must have attended the Walt Disney World school of tour guiding. Don found her hyper-cheeriness grating. The tour was disappointing in other ways as well: we were so far away from actual work activity, that it was hard to get any sense that there WAS work activity. The foundation of the lectures was large numbers. So many million cubic feet of this and so many million tons of that. In spite of the letdowns it was worthwhile just to see inside this enormous space with several 747-sized aircraft scattered around in different workstations.
After the tour we were bussed back to the Future of Flight museum and gift shop. Since Don had worked for Boeing (in Defense Electronics, not aircraft production) he was interested in a logo-emblazened T-shirt, but decided to patronize the online gift shop instead of the tourist oriented one.
We had a good lunch at the sparsely populated café next to the gift shop and then wandered around the Future of Flight museum for a while. Photos were allowed in there but Don's photography did not produce anything of value.
The tour started with a talk presented in a period (1870) saloon setting. The speaker (not Bill Speidel, he died) was a very talented, middle-aged guy who mixed a lot of humor with his history of early Seattle.
Did you know that Seattle was founded on tidal flats? I forget if the speaker gave an excuse for this lack of foresight, but the choice created an abundance of problems for the early residents, e.g. reverse flushing toilets. On the other hand, the plumbing difficulties bequeathed a fund of material for jokes by their ancestors in the tourism business.
Did you know that the cities of Seattle and Tacoma (30 miles south) are almost hostile in their rivalry? The speaker laced his talk with a number of humorous insults to Tacomans.
Along the factual line, the underground buildings exist because the original waterfront (tidal flats) of Seattle was buried intentionally to solve various problems (waste disposal among them) by building a retaining wall and washing down fill sediment from the hills above. The buildings thus buried were built (actually re-built after a fire) with full knowledge that they would have a limited useful life.
