Boeing Factory Tour, Bellvue Botanical Gardens & Baggage Switch

We spent the night in Everett so we would be within 5 minutes of the Future of Flight Aviation Center & Boeing Tour first thing this morning. The Boeing building is one of the largest in the US. We got to see 474's, 777 and 787's being made right before our eyes! Pretty incredible! The plant is immense!!! We had a great tour guide and it was a fun tour. They also had a really great Aviation center that had computerized learning zones about all the different aircraft that Boeing makes (any of those 700 series airplanes that you travel on all the time as well as a multitude of military aircraft that we never hear about). Great time! No cameras allowed in the assembly plant but we did get a couple of pictures of the area.

View from the observation tower. That is a Dreamliner aircraft that they use to carry the completed parts of the 787 from all over the world. They are then assemble the completed wings, engines, foresections etc. at the plant and complete the aircraft in 7 days!

A cross section of a 747. They tear down planes to test them for structural stresses and see where there might be weaknesses in the materials to help them in the design of new planes and improve current models. This was one of the displays in the Aviation Center.

After several hours here we headed down to Bellvue to the Botanical Gardens there. We had a wonderful lunch on the grounds and then visited their beautiful Fuchia display garden.

A Mary Fuchia

After a couple of hours there we headed south to Auburn for a hotel for the night and then back to Miah and Leslie's to switch out our camping stuff for our Hawaii stuff. What a life saver that has been not having to lug those duffles around for the whole month! They have a very cute house they are renting and a garage where the luggage was out of their way as well as ours :-) We all went to California Pizza Kitchen for dinner and a nice catchup time and then headed back to the motel for a good night's sleep.