Sunday, March 15, 2009

Seattle IV

Greetings avid reader. You have come back to the narration of ‘The Seattle Expedition’ – a chronicle of the awesome adventures experienced by my friends and me during the Labor Day weekend of 2008. In the last three episodes you read about the tale of our Great Trekking of Mt. Rainier, the disappointment at St. Helens and an intriguing blast to the space. This is the fourth and last episode in which I give you the events of our final day in Seattle when we see something that I never dreamt of seeing in my life.

Disclaimer: All names, places, accounts and events mentioned in the narration can be partially or entirely false. Reading this narrative can cause frequent Google searches, excessive nail growth syndrome and excessive nails. Other Side effects include loss of time, increased knowledge, read rage and erectile dysfunction.


THE SEATTLE EXPEDITION

September 1: The Last Crusade

Final day is always full of anxiety. All the exciting things that happened in the last few days keep coming back in our minds to remind us of all the fun we had, but there is that feeling of impending sadness that almost always accompanies a departure inching ever closer with every passed hour. For the past two and a half days we had such a great time that it was hard for me to even think about checking out from the hotel, and getting on the plane, going back to phoenix, getting home on a Monday night, and do nothing but thinking about getting up the next morning and going to work where I pretend to be busy but mostly do nothing.The grief evaporated soon after I was told that our first destination for the day was the Boeing Future of Flight Center. I thought about the numerous airplanes we saw the previous day at the Everett Flight Museum and before I could sarcastically roll my eyes and ask- “Airplanes…Again?” I was answered, much to my excitement; that-‘This is the place where Boeing actually makes all of its Commercial airliners’. I could almost hear the sweet sound of the Pratt & Whitney- PW 4062 engines on either side of a 747-400 (Wikipedia is awesome!!). It was a mildly cold Monday morning and after a satisfying breakfast I enthusiastically drove our Dodge Nitro rental car and at about mid morning we reached The Future of flight center.

We entered into a small parking lot and right next to the parking lot was the Welcome center proudly displaying the corporate insignia. Quite some distance away from it was a cluster of tall concrete structures in rectangular blocks, which looked as if they were designed by someone who didn’t know the meaning of the word ‘round’. The clusters were built wall-to-wall and had massive blue colored aircraft-hanger-type doors. Right outside the doors were some cars parked in a large parking space with a maze of white and yellow tracks made of reflective material. A few yards away, just in front was the massive open space which looked like a giant courtyard with no roof, with white striped lanes clearly marked in a similar reflective material and within those lanes were the brand new Boeing Commercial Passenger and Cargo Airliners fully built, neatly parked and ready for delivery to the clients- just like you would find cars parked outside a car dealership. From where we were standing it was quite a view to see all those tail wings with their owners’ logo sticking up in the air. As soon as we entered the Welcome center, for security reasons, we were asked to place all the electronic equipment, wallets, keys and any carry on items in a safety locker. Then came the standing in line for the tickets. With such a big company you would think there would be some sort of a Kiosk, but apparently they preferred a couple of girls in their late twenties for that job. After the wait and the tickets, we were directed to a medium sized auditorium where a short clip of Boeing’s history was played and once it was confirmed that we were at the edge of our seats with excitement, we were asked to board a bus just outside the hall.

With the tour guide happily narrating some trivia about the Company, the bus took us in a tour of the facility finally stopping in front of one of the rectangular blocks, which together with other blocks in the cluster holds the Guinness World Record for the largest building by volume (472 million cubic ft). We walked down the stairs and through a long tunneled corridor with a multitude of wires, pipes, lights, hydraulics, and a few exits attached to the inside of it. Then came the block-by-block tour of each unit in which the building of various aircrafts were done. We walked on metal balconies, more like viewing galleries, located a few tens of feet from the floor where about 4 planes (more or less per unit) were in their “production lines’, each in different stages of its construction. Just imagine a big car workshop, with planes and tools big and small. I found out that every rectangular block within the cluster we saw from the parking area was the assembly building for a specific type of plane- one each for 747, 767, 777 and the new 787.

As we looked on with wide-eyes and wider smiles, the tour guide, former flight attendant, explained how Boeing had innovated/improved a lot of design and development methods for these production lines starting from ‘the Ford Model’ to the ‘Moving Assembly Line’. The Moving Assembly Line, which is basically building an airplane on an industrial bed which keeps moving at constant rate from one station to another, has reduced the construction of a 777 from 26 days to a mere 8. We could see the planes in sort of a U shaped assembly line. In one end, was a new plane which has just started to be built and in front of it is another one with the fuselage half built and then one with wings getting attached until at the other end of the ‘U’ where a completed plane stands without engine- They attach the engines as the last job. We also got to see Boeing’s new addition to its catalog, the 787 – Dream-liner, which is expected to be a game changer in aviation industry. Its not yet released, which means we saw the first 3 of its kind as they were being built. For someone who never missed to look up the sky upon hearing the sound of an aircraft engine, which I still do, it was an unforgettable morning.

I bought a 747-model plane at the gift shop after the tour, and once we collected our belongings from the locker headed out to Pike Place market. Before the trip, I read something about it online and sort of imagined it to be a densely crowded public market with all kinds of shops selling everything from flowers to exotic spices and diners providing the freshest local dishes, Seattle’s most famous sea food collection and sweets to annoyed locals and completely rude and unapologetic tourists. It turned to be exactly that. It was almost as if I was back in Panagal Park, in Chennai. We had the fresh grilled salmon and fried Tilapias for lunch which was pretty good and bought some chocolate coated cherries for snacks. The time for our departure flight was getting closer and we desperately wanted to push it further, in vain.

In a final attempt to delay the return trip to airport, we stopped at Aki Beach and enjoyed the absolute beauty which the Seattle Coastal view. The Sun was shining with the right amount of warmth, with the Space Needle in the back drop, mildly cold wind blowing across from the mountains, it was ‘THE’ moment we were looking for. We reveled in all the fun things we did in the past 3 days and with satisfaction we headed to the airport after returning the car at the rental place.
My flight took off and landed on time in Phoenix and my friend gave me the ride back home. I went home on that Monday night and spent the night doing nothing but thinking about getting up the next morning and going to work where I pretend to be busy but mostly do nothing.
Thanks for joining me. Until next time.

Sunday, March 8, 2009

Seattle Story III

Hello and welcome to the third of four-part series in which I narrate my experience during the trip to Seattle my friends and I took on the Labor day of 2008. The series is titled “The Seattle Expedition” and you are here by given full authorization to dive head first into the penultimate day of the trip in which we move away from nature trails I described in the previous chapter and shift to explore some of modern man’s astonishing accomplishments on land and air.

Disclaimer: All names, places, accounts and events mentioned in the narration can be partially or entirely false. Reading this narrative can cause sudden increase in awesomeness and attractiveness, blinking-eye syndrome and body hair. Other Side effects include loss of time, increased knowledge, read rage and erectile dysfunction.

THE SEATTLE EXPEDITION

August 31: Kingdom Of Crystal Skull

It was a long time ago, since I had been to a small town/village and it was almost new to be in a place that had no trace of urgency, whatsoever. Not that I am too busy in phoenix, but the idea of having no tight schedules, tight corners with yield signs and blaring horns was such a refreshing experience. Morton, the place where I woke up on today (story’s today, not the actual today), was the place I described in the previous sentences. Yesterday (again, Story’s Yesterday) we visited Mt. Rainier and since due to weather conditions, we couldn’t reach the top and had to turn back, today we planned to visit another active strata volcano St. Helen. I am not sure if the residents thought if they named it after a female Saint the volcano might feel indecent to throw up all the hot lava when everyone is watching, but apparently, the name had no impact on its behavior. She blasted her nice tapering cone in 1980 during a violent eruption caused as an effect of a 5.1 Richter scale earthquake, drastically changing her and her surrounding’s appearance forever. The current crater on the top is a direct result of that eruption and she has been blowing up in smaller scales since 2004, which finally subsided in July 2008. So, that’s where we were planning to go. And we picked the city of Morton for its closeness to St. Helens.

After the nice shower and having previous night leftovers for breakfast, we marched out to our car and began the journey. We drove along the irresistible beauty, which is Washington’s greenery, which we were getting used to by now. The road started to get narrower and the trees started to get denser as we moved closer to mountain and as we got closer to within a few miles from it, the rear side of luck showed its metaphorical face as we entered the road that leads the foot of the mountain off the main intersection. Apparently there had been a bad rain a few weeks back, which resulted in a land slide which ‘slided’ the land, which was a part of the road we were supposed to travel. There was a big signboard along with the area map of the landscape, showing another roundabout route to our desired destination, but that would offset our overall travel plan by several hours. So, we decided against it and traveled back to or starting point- Morton which would lead us to our next destination, cheap lunch.

It was disappointing- not being able to set foot on a very recently active volcano and that too after being so close- and on top of that we had wasted that many hours driving to and fro without any apparent gain. Anyway, I think almost all of out miseries can be fixed by a good lunch that doesn’t cost that much. Enter Subway Five-Dollar Sandwich. With 5 types of bread, a couple of them actually tasting well, around 10 types of dressings and even more number of questions from the sweet girl behind the counter, its hard not get satisfied. And that’s the Lunch.

Since we were not about to scale the height of the volcano, we decided to go higher- Aviation. Again, since we couldn’t possibly learn all the principles of aviation and start flying in the given time frame, we decided to visit the flight museum is Seattle. The drive was long and at the end of it we were out of the real woods and into the wilderness of concrete jungle called Everett in Seattle. Inside the museum they had all kinds of aircraft, real and scaled models, civilian, space and military, those that land on runways on earth and those that land on the surface of the outer planets. Another category is those that you can touch, and those that you are only allowed stand behind a counter and just look. I worked on these categories for sometime before typing them. There was the SR-71 Blackbird which was used as a spy plane during cold war, there was the Boeing 747 – 1 which was basically the first 747 ever built, and then there was British Airways’ Concorde, yes I mean THE CONCORDE. And then they had lots of other planes. The museum had an actual size air-traffic control room where they had the actual air-traffic monitoring equipment with little buttons when pressed or turned will give the sound or the indication of the actual flight conversation. If you are an aeronautics freak like some friends’ of mine, then you’ll love it a great deal. If you are not into planes but go crazy for super sized toys, like me, then you will love it even more. There was the Air-Force One used by former presidents like Johnson, Nixon and Kennedy, and the Lunar Rover which was used by the Astronauts during their terrestrial exploration of Moon. Outside the Museum, arranged by a private group was a Bi-Plane ride, which you can see in the movies about world war. Couple of colleagues of mine decided to air raid the imaginary Nazi-Occupied area over Seattle bay and went on an excursion, which seemed like an ecstatic experience. If looking at and touching the planes was fun, actually riding it must be surely nothing less than a thrill. You can see them all (not all, a few of them) here.

By the time the Air-attack ended the sun had half settled on the western horizon and we decided to visit Seattle downtown, and once we reached there, we started on foot hunting for a coffee shop. Apparently, on Sundays, they close the coffee shops after 5-ish pm. In the unofficial home of American Coffee-Seattle, we roamed around fruitless-ly for about an hour before we could locate a Starbucks. After the caffeine fix, we headed out for the next reach for the sky, the Seattle Space Needle.

The Space Needle was built as an icon of the American achievement in science and space constructed in 1962 for the World’s Fair held in the same year. It was during the era of space war between U of SSR and US of A and this tower was seen as a symbol of the heights that American innovation had scaled and its future. Indeed, once you visit it, you cannot resist going up. The tower is 605 ft (184m) from the level to the air-traffic beacon on top and it houses an observatory, revolving restaurant and, as mandatory in all American landmarks, an over priced gift shop, at the floor level. It houses an elevator, which carries tourists at an astounding speed of 10 mph (16kmph) reaching the top in 43 seconds. All said and done the view from the top is stupendous. We were lucky to get fogless night that day, and the city of Seattle simply shined with little blue, red, yellow lights. There were on-board cameras at the top providing panoramic 360 degree view around the needle. It takes no effort to understand the size of this tower and almost too easy to appreciate the splendor it provides to the landscape. We got so immersed in it that we forgot about dinner, till our stomach's reminded us with the typical grumble.
We enjoyed a nice dinner at an Indian restaurant and bagged some for later. We drove to our hotel room in Seattle, which was comfy enough for a round of cards. As expected, I was ruthless in my victory and when they could not take it anymore, I called a satisfying day and went to bed.

Coming up next, our final day in Seattle, when we visit Boeing’s cave where they magically turn toy planes to real ones and a market that reminds me of home!!. Join me for the fourth and final installment of “The Seattle Expedition”.

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