Today we had planned to head north up to Everett to take the Boeing Factory Tour. Instead we traveled south to Boeing Field to take a look at the Museum of Flight.

In hindsight the strike at Boeing was a good thing, because we would have otherwise missed out on a great museum.

We took an hour long tour through the main gallery. The tour showed the rapid evolution of flight, from the Wright Flyer, through Air Mail to the first passenger services… the military and to the fastest plane in the world… a variant of the SR-71 Blackbird. Whilst Kerrina tried to stay interested, Paul absolutely loved it.

Then we jumped across the road to the Air Park. Here they have the last Concorde ever to fly, and the Boeing 707 that used to be Air Force One – the one that JFK and presidents of that time used. Kerrina was quite excited to walk on Air Force One.

Unfortunately the Concorde was closed to visitors for two days for cleaning, so we missed out on taking a look inside that one.

Today was the earliest start of our trip! Checkout at 5am to get on the 5:30am bus from Vancouver to Seattle.

The only saving grace of this trip was that the bus had wi-fi – so we could catch up on all the news at home using Paul’s iPod!

On our Journey to Seattle we were lucky enough to enjoy a land based border crossing into the United States. Being of other than US or Canadian citizenship – they let us go first. Not that it really made a difference, because our bus was held up by two suspicious looking folk on our bus. Actually they weren’t that suspicious, just that something in the computer meant that they border protection guy had to do a 60 minute interview with them. Bummer.

The good news was that the bus drive told them to get the next bus – so we continued on towards Seattle.

We arrived in Seattle mid morning. It was then we realised that our travel agent had booked us into a hotel no where near any of the good stuff. In fact our hotel was right beside the University, about 6 miles out of downtown.

And to top it off, the main reason why we came to Seattle was to do a tour of the Boeing Factory. But our good friends at Boeing decided to strike 3 days before we arrived – which meant ALL TOURS CANCELED! Talk about a bad start to a city!

That being said, the weather was really nice, so we sat on the grass at the bottom of the Space Needle for a while before going to the Experience Music Project.

The EMP was one of the best museums we have ever been into. Plenty on the Seattle music scene that has brought us folks like Nirvana, Pearl Jam and The Presidents of the United States of America, as well as feature on Jimi Hendrix, and a room full of guitars which documents the evolution of the instrument through the ages. Highly recommended for anyone! The highlight was the guitar “sculpture” in the middle of the museum. They had a few guitars rigged up to play automatically in the piece, which you could listen to with headphones at the bottom – was really amazing!

After that we grabbed a late lunch before finding our way to the hotel in the middle of nowhere.

Today was really our last full day in Canada – so we decided to take a day trip a few hours up the road to Whistler. Whistler is a great little town – however they should probably call it “Little Sydney” because all you could hear was Australian accents.

Obviously as it was summer there wasn’t much snow around. The mountains and ski lifts had been taken over by at least 500 mountain bikers taking advantage of the perfect weather.

We both agree that Whistler would be a great place to come back to in the winter. They are going to host a lot of the alpine events of the 2010 Winter Olympics there… so we made sure we checked out the ridiculously overpriced merchandise, and the visitor centre.

In hindsight, I would have looked much more aerodynamic if I took my camera bag off!

The shortest border crossing…, originally uploaded by Paul Woods.

The big Island is the USA, the Small Island is Canada (or is it the other way around, I can’t remember)