Wednesday July 4th: the main event for us today was a tour of the Boeing Aircraft factory in Everett Washington. They are very strict about visitors not having any type of electronic device while on the tour, so I have no pictures from inside the facility. We were taken by bus from the visitor’s center to the manufacturing building where we used underground service tunnels to go between the different areas we saw on the tour. The facility manufactures all the larger cargo and passenger jets in the Boeing fleet, including the new 787 Dreamliner. The 747’s are built at work stations, with the plane sections moved from station to station with large overhead cranes. The dreamliner is built on an assembly line that moves 1.6 inches per hour. All of the models built at this facility take about three days to assemble. This would be a bare airplane at completion, with added time needed to paint and install interior as that work is done per the purchaser’s wishes. They presently have orders for over 900 Dreamliners including 14 private plane orders. If you ordered one today, you wouldn’t get it until 2019. They didn’t say how many orders they have for the redesigned 747 cargo plane, but they said it was the world leader in cargo planes so I’m sure they have a backlog of orders for them too. BTW, if you would like to have a Dreamliner all you need to pony up is about 100 million as a down payment and they’ll be happy to put you on the list!
On our way home we drove to Anacortes. We will be taking the ferry from there early tomorrow morning and wanted to make sure we could find the ferry terminal. Anacortes is a fair sized city, what we saw of it today seemed very nice. It has a large maritime presence both commercial and pleasure. We saw large barges and ships in dry-dock on one side of town and the largest pleasure boat marina I’ve ever seen on the other side of town.
Thursday July 5th: Millie and I went on a cruise today. We departed Anacortes aboard one of the Washington State Ferry’s and enjoyed a cruise through the San Juan Islands. We disembarked at Friday Harbor, had lunch and walked around the waterfront, before reboarding when the next ferry arrived and continued our cruise back to Anacortes.
Tomorrow we leave here and head north again, our next campground is just a few miles from the Canadian border. We will stay there a couple days while we visit Vancouver.
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