If it's not Boeing, I'm not going!

5th July
When we decided to visit Seattle, James immediately booked us on a tour of the Boeing aircraft factory. This will come as no surprise to anyone reading this who knows James, as he is a well known aircraft enthusiast and has brought up his sons to feel the same way. So Davie was also very excited about today's trip. To mark the occasion James wore his Battle of Britain t-shirt! We were collected from our hotel and whisked off on the 45 minutes drive to the Boeing factory. We had a rather lively tour guide, who kept up an endless commentary punctuated with phrases such as "Are you stoked?", "All righty!" and shouts of "Yay!". She also inexplicably laughed wildly from time to time.
The tour of the factory was admittedly very impressive. Outside it there was an unusually fat plane called the "Dreamlifter" because it was specially made to carry parts of aircraft to the factory for assembly. The scale of the factory was huge, and we could see the planes being assembled in a giant production line, from the constituent parts right up to the finished products which were nearly ready to be rolled out of the huge doors. We saw 747s, 777s, and 787s; when they were finished you could see them all painted in the colours of whatever airline had ordered them. The factory floor was so gigantic that the people working there looked tiny in the distance; I noticed that their canteen was called "The Dreamliner Diner" which is a cool name. James and Davie were in their element and were so happy, after the tour they bought themselves Boeing t-shirts from the gift shop.
Back in downtown Seattle, we decided to go for a walk to the Pioneer Square area. However it was much seedier than we expected and full of scary looking characters - we have noticed that there are quite a lot of down-and-outs in Seattle, but I suppose that's true of any city. So we circled round back to the more picturesque Pike Place market area, which was absolutely hooching today. We saw the "original Starbucks" but didn't go in because it was so crowded; instead we had coffee in a pretty little café off Post Lane. When we were there a friendly man wearing a natty t-shirt emblazoned with the logo National Gay Pilots Association noticed James' Battle of Britain t-shirt and started chatting to him; he had been a pilot for 30 years and had just obtained his seaplane licence. The hot, sunny weather continues and it was lovely to be sitting outside in this friendly, vibrant city.