Everett WA

Another beautiful day in Paradise! Had a nice quiet night here and the morning dawns sunny and warm.  We drive about five miles to the Alderwood Mall, this is a good one, most of the department stores, JC Penneys, Macys, Sears, plus lots of chain stores.  Yay, they have a Cinnabon here, that’s where we meet up for lunch.  

Arrive at Boeing well in time for our 3.30 pm tour.  After a 3 minutes video we all pile on two buses and are driven to the first 3/4 mile long tunnel, up the elevator to the third level which has a catwalk overseeing the building operation.  It is pretty amazing, the factory building is 1,025 acres, you can fit LA’s Disneyland into it and have 12 acres spare.  There is not an overload of info but one bit is totally relevant to us - NZ bought the first two Boeing manufactured cargo planes, for our mail delivery!  Hah, we are famous again – this time for a good reason!

Our tour finished at 5pm and we luck out once again - on Fridays Boeing have Happy Hour from 4 pm and we are invited.  So we rock up to the observation deck, get our glass of wine and beer and sit outside in the sun, away from the wind, listening to the live music and watching planes come in to land and take off.  Life is good!  Whoa, an F18 takes off right over our heads, the noise is absolutely deafening, totally drowning out the band, not that anybody can hear for the next five minutes anyway.  A lovely evening!

We are  going to boondock here tonight seeing it’s already  after 7 pm.  I think we will be OK, we will wait until it’s dark before we put the slides out.  Two trucks rock up and also park for the night, unfortunately one is a refrig unit so is noisy all night.  Then before dawn a jet takes off and  I swear it breaks the sound barrier!  Oh well, it was free accommodation.