The Museum of Flight
Our last post for this adventure
15.06.2022 - 19.06.2022
Tuesday morning, after we picked up our rental car, we drove over to the Museum of Flight. It's not far from SeaTac, adjacent to the King County International Airport in Tukwilla, WA. The websites say to allow for 3 hours. They lied. We got there about lunch time and hadn't come close to seeing everything when they announced closing time. We were almost the last to leave as they locked the doors behind us.
I'm writing this a couple months after we were there, so I don't remember a lot of details, but the next time we are in the area, I want to go back and see the parts we missed.
Some details that I do remember:
They had some interesting displays of the "space race" with both US and USSR hardware and mini-biographies of some of the important but not necessarily famous people who contributed to both the US and USSR programs.
They had an enormous floor (and ceiling) dedicated to WWII airplanes, a wing for WWI, a mezzanine for the early spread and establishment of aviation in the Pacific Northwest, including Alaska.
They had an M-21 and its D-21. The M-21 was a variant of the SR-71 Blackbird; it's purpose was to carry and launch a reconnaissance drone, the D-21. Since the M-21 is a variant of the Blackbird, it looks like the Blackbird. The D-21 looks like a miniature Blackbird, but since it's a drone, it needs no cockpit. Its cockpit area was replaced with its jet engine air-intake that looks like the intake of an SR-71 jet engine.
Across the street was a covered, fenced-in outside display of large airplanes, including the Air Force One that was used by J F Kennedy. There was also a Boeing 787; it was their test bed and wasn't "decked out" for passengers, but was still interesting. They had a Concorde you could walk through. Boy, it's cramped!
From Seattle we drove to Ellensburg to visit with Sandy's dad and his wife, Lois, for a few days. One of the days we were there, we drove up to Leavenworth, WA (a Bavarian-style mountain tourist venue) for a lunch of tasty-but-tough sausages and some excellent gelato.
We spent some time with Sandy's nephew Nathan's family who also live Ellensburg (they have two sweet, cute pre-school daughters), and took Sandy's dad out for an early Father's Day breakfast before we left town on Friday.
We stayed Friday night at the Coast Gateway Hotel again (when you find something that works, you might as well stay with it) and flew out early on Saturday morning for Atlanta.
I realized today that I've never mentioned our travel agent who helped us arrange this most excellent vacation/adventure. If you want an individualized, well-planned, carefully-thought-out vacation, call
Sue Picken, of Sapphire Travel and Tours
404-259-8025
[email protected]
www.sapphiretravel.net
Posted by dasafish 19:58 Archived in USA Tagged seattle ellensburg museum_of_flight leavenworth_wa sapphire_travel sue_picken Comments (0)