This saturday we headed over to Boeing field and stopped in at the Museum of Flight. We really had a great time - it was much different than we thought. We've been to the National Air and Space Museum, and while I liked it, we didn't spend very much time there. This was different. The whole museum focused on the human element as well as the machines.

 

The first section house the "little red barn", which is the original Boeing plant. Since most of an aircraft was made of wood in the early 1900's, it was basically a high-tech woodshop. I used to work part-time in an old furniture craftsman in North Carolina, and this really brought back memories. They had old silent films of the workmen laying up dozens of layers of wood and then shaving it down to make the propellers, some of them over 8 feet long. They had wood in various stages of this process that you could handle. The rest of the "barn" (actually a very nice woodshop) had photos, flight gear, historical monuments and more. Upstairs was the design area, where the engineers created blueprints for the workers downstairs. They even had woodshop noises piping through the loudspeakers, so you felt like you were really there. I liked how they had everything set up as if everyone were still there working - just out for lunch or on break.

 

The next section had aircraft and scenes from World War I, and downstairs from that, World War II. You could stop in at several "Flight-briefing rooms" to see movies about the affects of airpower on war. These little buildings inside the main building were designed to look just like they did in the wars, and they talked about what the men and women sacrificed during that time. They also had radios at each aircraft display that you could turn on to hear real recordings from the news radio programs and music from that era. The planes were all staged to look in flight or as if they had just landed.

 

The other part of the tour had modern aircraft from an SR-71 spy plane to a 737 cabin you could walk in a look around the cockpit. They also had cockpits from an F-4 fighter jet you could sit in. Everything there is very hands-on - they even had a spacesuit simulator you could use to dock with a space station for repairs. I crashed it twice, so if you're ever in space with me, make sure you drive.

 

One of my favorite parts was a full mockup of an Air Traffic control tower. They even have the tower overlooking an active runway, and you can hear the chatter over the speakers and see the instruments the operators use. There are several panels where you can test yourself with exercises that the operators take such as setting up radio frequencies and so forth.

 

We spent all day there - far longer than I thought. It's definitely something to do again!

This morning we broke the routine of country/city/country - we went to Mount Saint Helens last week, and this week we climbed up one side of Mount Pilchuck, which is a couple of hours north of here. We met up with our good friend Mark and his son and daughter for a picnic. It was pretty chilly for climb up, since it's getting to be that time of year.

 

There are actually a lot of things to see on Mount Pilchuck, but this time we went to Heather Lake, which was about a two-hour hike up to a ridge. It was a steep hike across many different kinds of terrain. When we first started the hike, the ground looked like a felt carpet, turned into hard ground, and then got very rocky and steep. After the climb, we came on this increadible ice-fed lake. Opposite the ridge are two sides of a sheer shale cliff, rising hundreds of feet, with boulders strewn all over below. The cliffs were reflected in the lake - it was really stunning. Even though we got there after 2:00, there was still frost on the ground, because in the fall and winter the sun doesn't break directly into the area where the lake is.

 

After we left the mountain, we came back home to meet up with another good friend, who is from Vietnam. We drove out to the International District in Seattle, and he and his family took us out to eat at a Vietnamese restaurant. It was fantastic! Christina surprised everyone by eating more than I did!

We woke up this morning to a lot of fog - but we had decided to go to Mount Saint Helens today, so we loaded up and went anyway. It takes about three hours to get tot the west entrance from where we live, and we kept checking the sky for a break - to no avail. We stopped off at the Silver Lake visitor center, where the trees are so beautiful during the change of colors. I found some bright blue plants with red berries and pale white fronds - American plants!  Everything around in the low fog had an erie beauty and the lake has a wooden walkway out to a trail and back.

 

Once inside the center we watched a film about the survivors from the eruption of Mount Saint Helens in 1980, 26 years ago. I was in high school then, so I didn't remember how incredible it was - the power they talked about was beyond what I could imagine. They said that the power released was equivalent to thousands of atomic bombs going off, and that if the matter erupted were piled in the city of Seattle it would reach the top of the Space Needle! It flattend millions of trees, created new lakes and destroyed old ones, piled some places dozens of feet under ash, and even affected the world's temperature for a year.

 

We drove on up about 50 miles towards the volcano, and stopped off at a few of the other centers along the way. When we got higher up and closer to the volcano, the sun was above the clouds below us and we got a great view. It's staggering to see what was the mountain, and how almost half of it was gone. You could see the valley it had created from the tons and tons of lava and mud it exploded.

 

As we got closer, I was stunned. All around was devastation - even 26 years later. They harvested a lot of the logs, and planted new trees, but in places it looks like you're on the moon. Very amazing. And when we got within three miles of the main crater, you could see that two new steam vents have opened, and a new lava dome is forming.