William's current career goal is to be a commercial pilot. So GrampCamp took us to no less than 4 air museums and the Boeing factory in Everett Washington as we camped our way from Sacramento to Seattle and beyond. A good time was had at every single one of them! William had left to go home by the time we could write about the air museums, so all of this is written by me, with no italics.
Tillamook Air Museum in Tillamook, Oregon
On the way: We stopped by the Tillamook cheese factory. It used to show hand made cheese with open tanks and cheese makers working so you could see what they were doing. Now it is a giant, very crowded tourist trap -- don't go there.
Go farther down the road to the Blue Heron French Cheese Company store. You can buy the same cheese (for less) and have a lovely experience not looking at stainless steel tanks where a sign says cheese is being made. For Campers like us, this is a great Harvest Host site (but wasn't part of GrampCamp).
The Air Museum in Tillamook is located in a giant, wooden blimp hanger (15 stories tall) built during World War II to house blimps that could defend the west coast against a possible Japanese invasion. There's a small blimp still in it and a lot of war crafts. Interesting enough, but William is interested in commercial aircraft.
Evergreen Aviation Museum (and Water Park) in McMinneville, Oregon.
Home of the Spruce Goose -- the largest (and it is LARGE) wooden airplane ever made, and made by Howard Hughs, and lots more military aircraft.
It is too big to photograph inside the same building as it is in. Trust me when I say your house and mine could fit under one wing span. The numbers are all on the Evergreen web site should you want them.
Here's the other end of it -- the cafe and an entire display about the thing is under one wing span. Note the airplanes in the back ground.All in all, this is a nice aircraft museum. We recommend it. Perhaps the best part was the water park next door. William had a blast there.
Note that the water slides originate from the fuselage of a 747 parked on the roof.
On the Way: We skipped Portland to drive down the Columbia River Gorge where we:
1. Didn't see Multnomah Falls up close -- turn out it is now a timed entry attraction.
2. Went to Bonneville Dam and watched big salmon through a thick glass maneuver through the fish ladder.
3. Went on to Hood River to the WAAAM Museum. We had learned about it at Evergreen from a fellow swimmer that William met at the Campground in McMinneville.
This unexpected museum has a HUGE collection of all sorts of airplanes (and cars) that still fly, although none of them were actually flying. Maintained by volunteers and old airplane buffs, there are all kinds of early planes including an early PanAm plane (note, commercial) that carried about 5 passengers, but the flight attendant had a snazzy uniform. And for some reason, which I am sure some of you know (for extra strength and rigidity) the outside of the airplane was covered in corrugated metal.
Passing through Portland on our way back to our campground at Jantzen Beach on Hayden Island, we spotted a Gondola. Turns out that it was about a five-minute ride from one side of Portland to the other and looked like fun. So we found a place to park Baby and took a round-trip trip on the Gondola. (I did this willingly, Sue L.)  |
The view of Portland from the gondola.
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That made us late for our check in at the campground, and that's OK. Campgrounds of all sorts leave a late check in packet. But this one omitted the key card needed to open the bathroom doors. Interesting night....
It also, much to William's delight, was located very near the Portland Airport. We wish we could have bottled his excitement as he spotted all types of aircraft from different international air lines. He was especially happy to spot a British Airways 787. His skills at this were impressive. (Internet pic -- I did snap one when he asked but that plane was far away and moving fast!)
On the way: No one was very interested in Mt. St. Helen's, so we went straight to Seattle. The traffic won -- just so bad. We tried a Hop on- Hop -off tour but the traffic still won. The only place we hopped off was the original Starbucks, where W got something resembling a milk shake. Then we waited an hour for the bus to come back to us... the traffic still won.
The Museum of Flight, in Seattle, has many galleries and a rich history, had a whole gallery of commercial airliners. William, who knew every single fact about every single one of them, was in heaven there. We climbed up about 12 flights of stairs in and out of these planes -- everything from the Air Force One built for Eisenhower and that carried LBJ to Dallas after the Kennedy assassination, but evidently a fancier one carried him and Mrs. Kennedy back to Washington. We toured a Dream Liners, and much more. This gallery was great fun!
There were also space galleries, and early flight galleries, and the origins of the Boeing Red Barn (although this wasn't a specific Boeing museum), a flight deck, and so much more. Fabulous facility.
The Boeing Factory Tour was truly the best of the Air Museums. Truly the best of our air museum experiences. Although the factor tour was more of a talk from an observation point than a tour, it was in the factory. The building is claimed to be the largest, by volume, in the world. What we saw was a giant sized version of an assembly line creating Boeing 777s. We were not allowed to take anything with us -- certainly no phones or cameras, so this is an Internet picture:
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We did see a lot and learned a lot -- things that we didn't know we didn't know. It was amazing the newer planes are build with carbon fiber to reduce their weight by 20%! That's always the best kind of tour.
There was a STEM museum attached that was specifically Boeing oriented. We were allowed to take pictures there. It was a fine couple of hours. 
From Boeing, we drove about a mile and found the Mukilteo Beach Park for a few hours of kite flying. Mukilteo is a suburb of Everett, with an incredible beach. A lot was going on there -- a baby shower under one pavilion and a wedding shower under another. A group of musicians (associated with neither event) was playing on the beach, and William was flying his kite.
We returned the next day for a walk-on Washington State Ferry ride to Windbey Island. We walked a little way on the Island, ate lunch at a place called the Shrimp Shack (shack being the operative word; they were out of shrimp), had the best veggie burgers ever.
 | | Had we followed directions correctly we would have been lined up to leave the ferry at this point, but we didn't, so we had to wait for all the cars to unload. Fun watching that, and we did the Hokey Pokey in the stair well. This is the landing on Windbey Island |
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| We sent William home via Southwest from a jam-packed SeaTac. We'll miss him. |
WOYAYA
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