A very welcome sea day yesterday after many beautiful Alaskan ports.
We have a rather big organised tour today with Michael, along with over 30 others and we will be visiting the Boeing factory, as well as touring the city…..
We began with the city tour and our tour guide Keith and driver Ron, were amazing the way they manoeuvered our big bus all over the city. Taking photos of the city streets was difficult from the bus but from what we saw, it is an extremely clean, neat and tidy place. There is a beautiful rock garden/waterfall right in the middle of tall office blocks, where a building was demolished – a very peaceful space!! It's also very hilly in Seattle so were able to capture some good views at several high points.
Just a short distance to Commodore Park, which has locks for boats and also a fish ladder for the salmon to help them swim upstream (we did see plenty in the water but they didn't come out too well in the photos). We also stopped at a wonderful part of the city where some very lucky people live in quaint and stunning water homes.
Lunch stop was at the famous Pike Markets – wall to wall people!! This is where the very first Starbucks café opened and the queue was ridiculous. Inside the market place was also packed 'like sardines', with hundreds of stalls displaying the locals' fresh produce, art, jewellery, clothing… the works!!! Fortunately we were able to find a cute little café up a side street, actually got a seat and enjoyed a fabulous lunch.
Back on the bus and off to the Boeing factory which was massive – apparently it's the largest building in the world by volume (a whopping 472 million cubic feet of space). We started at the Future of Flight Aviation Center for a quick video, then boarded one of their buses to tour inside two enormous hangars. Within these buildings we saw the new 'Dreamliner' in various stages of assembly, as well as a 747 cargo plane, which is 18' longer than the passenger plane. The sheer size of 'everything' was mind blowing!! All very interesting but because of their very strict security, we were not able to take cameras or phones, or in fact anything with us on the tour.
After a very long day, we dropped a few off at the Space Needle but we decided to go back to the ship. Consequently, I didn't get a close up picture of it – but I did get an incredible photo though from the bus - I actually captured it directly behind a tree!!!!... couldn't have done it if I had tried!!!
It was a beautiful sunset watching a yacht race from our balcony, overlooking the zillions of dollars moored in the boat harbour… next stop Victoria, Canada.
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