What I Did On My Summer Vacation - Museum of Flight

It's hardly a stretch to put a pretty decent flight museum here in Seattle, after all, this is the home of Boeing and one of Seattle's nicknames is "Jet City," not to mention that this was the home of the Seattle Supersonics until 2008. Mom and I went to the Museum of Flight today, and I would recommend it, even if I did spend most of my time reading about flight attendant fashion rather than engine specifications and windspeed.

This is looking down the nose of something. Seriously, I didn't really read any of the information. Since I am a history teacher, sometimes going to museums, especially military history museums, is a bit difficult.

View of the planes suspended from the ceiling of the main hall. They all are facing the same direction and it looks very much like they are flying away.

The original Boeing manufacturing building (1917-1919) is on the grounds, and it is a very cool wooden building where they later designed and built specific parts of the planes. There is a timeclock on the wall that I thought was really nifty looking.

This piece of machinery was also in the original building. No, I don't know what it did.

Across the street was a retired Concorde jet, a retired Air Force One, a 747, something from NASA that wasn't labeled, and a few other planes. The shot below is a shot of the walkway going to that part of the museum.

The Concorde was not fun. Most of it was closed off, and they had put plexiglass over all the seats in a curved shape that made it almost impossible to walk through. I don't really get claustrophobic except underground, but that made me very much so and I left fairly quickly. I did get this shot, of a prime example of government spending habits.

This was on the side of the thing from NASA, a lot of people signed it. As I stated previously, I have no idea what it is, or why everyone signed it. But it looked cool.

 There was a traveling exhibit on planes used in World War I and World War II. Mom was getting really tired so I didn't go upstairs to the WWI planes, but I spent several minutes trying to get a decent shot of these.  

 This sticker was on nearly every propeller blade in the entire WWII wing and I liked the way it looked on the black wing. Unfortunately, it was also quite dark in the exhibit, so I had a hard time getting this.

I thought that Air Force One was really cool...it was the plane that was used by Presidents Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson and Nixon, and was the one that Nikita Khruschev used on his trip to the US in 1959. It was also the one that was used by Johnson to fly to Dallas to be sworn in after the assassination of JFK. No, I didn't get any pictures of it. There was lots of plexiglass and not much room to maneuver.