May 2007

We spend the day doing chores--I finish putting Joe's homeschool portfolio together and send it off (YEA!) and organize/clean the RV. Jere does work on the truck and RV to make sure it's ready for the long drive to Alaska. We both take time to look at a map and discuss our route to Alaska. It's over 1000 miles away from here! Seems like it should be closer :-) We plan to make many stops in British Columbia and Yukon on the way to Alaska, but we find that the route we planned to take between Vancouver and Dawson Creek has a section with a lot of construction as they prepare to host the 2010 Winter Olympics in Whistler BC. No problem...we change our route to Canada 1, which is also supposed to have wonderful scenery.

We take a break in the afternoon with a trip to the post office, and then a quick stop at Krispy Kreme donuts (to celebrate the end of the official school year). And another break in the evening to swim many laps in the indoor pool to burn up some of the many calories from the Krispy Kreme donuts :-)

Hopefully we are making our last trip to the Camping World garage (or any garage) for this trip.

We took our RV to the Burlington WA Camping World garage to have our wheel bearings greased and a second battery installed. We dropped it off at 8am and it was done around 5:30pm; much longer than we expected, so we decided to simply stay in the area another night, so back to the Burlington KOA.

We had done a lot of shopping and run several errands today, but we still have a day's worth of chores to do before leaving for Alaska. So we'll spend tomorrow doing chores again.

We walk around the campground, watch American Idol (Blake Lewis is still on the show -- we thought he was booted off last week) and continue getting ready for our Alaska trip.

We have reservations for the Boeing factory tour in Everett, WA today at 11am, so we get up early to pack up and take off for what we thought would be an hour drive. Traffic in Seattle was horrible, so we sat in traffic for 30 minutes, barely moving and called to have our tour moved to 11:30.

The Boeing factory in Everett is where they assemble their large jets. They were assembling several 777s today when we toured their large building. It was interesting to see simply because the building if HUGE. It's the largest building in the world by volume. I forget how many football fields they said they could fit in there; however, I do remember that they said they could fit Disneyland inside.

They talked alot about their newest jetliner, the Dreamliner. I think they said it's an 787. They were setting up to build their first one in the near future.

We spent some time in their Future of Flight museum, including a consumer survey to give them feedback on two different interiors of a jet. We sat in two different mock-ups of jet interiors and rated them. They gave us a Boeing pen as a thank you :-) Joe and Jere had fun pretending to drive a jet in their museum:

We drove to Burlington WA after the tour. We have an 8am appointment at the Burlington Camping World tomorrow to have some work done on the RV.

We decided to stay in Seattle another day to try to get caught up with a long 'to do' list. So I spent a large part of the dreary cold day inside the RV organizing Joe's homeschool portfolio; I'm not sure what Jere was up to today but he assures me that all the hours he spent on the laptop today were necessary--supposedly paying bills etc--but I suspect he was reading the Cincinnati Reds blog :-)

We were hoping that the sun would peak out by dinner so we could go for a nice walk, but that didn't happen. Oh well.... I did get a lot done today, and I enjoyed talking to all 3 of my daughters (Mother's Day phonecalls).

Well, we thought today was supposed to be sunny, so we had decided to go up to the top of the Space Needle in Seattle today; BUT the weatherman changed his forecast this morning and it will be cloudy by Noon. We decide to go to the top anyway, and we're glad we did.

Although we couldn't see Mt Rainier very well (in fact, barely at all since the snow blended in with the clouds), we had great views of Seattle and the surrounding area. Plus there was a festival going on at the docks, so we had fun watching the tugboats and fireboats parade. We were enjoying the view so much that we decided to get some coffee & snacks, and then watch the view for another hour from our chairs.

The view from our seats, where we spent a solid hour just watching the boats go by:

So after two hours on top of the Space Needle (about 1 1/2 hours more than we expected), we took the elevator back down (went over to see Sanjaya from American Idol signing autographs) and spent about two hours next door at the science center. I particularly liked their indoor butterfly garden....dozens of butterflies flying around us!

They boast the largest acoustical and electric guitars in the world:

We only had snacks on top of the Space Needle for lunch, so we had an early dinner at the food court in the Seattle Center House, next to the museum, and then headed "home".

One side note: We had originally planned to have lunch on top of the Space Needle in their restaurant, but after finding out it was going to cost $46 per person for brunch (plus tip), we said 'no thank you'. Our coffee and cinnamin rolls (Joe had soda and Miniature Reese Cups) in the lounge on the observation deck only cost us about $14 and was better than the revolving restaurant, since we could watch the activities in the bay instead of revolving around in the restaurant to the inland side of Seattle. In case you ever get to Seattle and also can't afford to spend $150 on a family meal :-)