Sorry for the delay – I took some time off to get married…
It’s early afternoon on our last full day in Seattle, and we’re starting to feel the exhaustion of non-stop touring settling in. Luckily, The Museum of Flight is something we’ve been looking forward to, so we soldier on!
One last Fast Pass, I mean City Pass, line (and I realized yesterday that I missed reporting on an entire attraction we did Friday!!! Oops! I’ll get back to that soon!)
The Seattle City Pass offered you a choice of doing either The Museum of Flight or the Seattle Zoo (and gives you a coupon for the other, in case you want to do both). After looking over both websites, we both agreed the Flight museum sounded more interesting than the zoo (living near Chicago’s 2 major zoos also tipped the scales in the Museum’s direction). The part I was really interested in was that they had an actual Air Force One plane and an actual Concord plane that you could go inside and see.
We enter the museum and head into the first room on the left. We begin in the Great Gallery, a six-story tall glass and steel structure gracefully suspending more than 20 full-size aircraft from its ultra-modern frame.
I never knew about the plans for a Car-Plane! The wings come off and you pull them on a trailer when you’re on the ground.
Ethan tries to see if 6’5″ is too tall for a fighter plane cockpit (I’m just guessing that’s what the plane was).
Oh, the joy of the internet – it was an SR-71A Blackbird reconnaissance plane! This next picture is NOT an SR-71A Blackbird reconnaissance plane.
Off to the side of the Great Gallery is a Space section, complete with a full size replica of the International Space Station’s Destiny Research Laboratory. Ethan is far too tall to be an astronaut, but Elmo floats beautifully!
I’m getting sleepy, but it’s time to go find the planes we came to see – Air Force One and the Concord! We walk over the Memorial Bridge (plane sounds and music are piped in – we heard the theme from Star Wars) and over to the Airpark.
There they were – let’s start with the Concord. Everything inside was plexiglassed off for preservation, but it was still pretty cool to be inside one.
I have this strange habit of turning the camera sideways at an angle – see the trees and poles in the background?
It seems nothing is built to Ethan Scale…
Looking down at the seats and foot rests.
Over all – it was just a plane… a fast plane, but still just a plane. FUN FACT: There have been more astronauts than Concord pilots.
Over to Air Force One!
