We drove back to Seattle with Richard and Grace and spent one night at an Airbnb on Whidbey Island with them. Before boarding the ferry to Whidbey Island we also toured the Boeing aircraft factory and “Future of Flight” tour at Everett, WA. Actually the plant is in the small town of Mukilteo which is also the departure point for the ferry to Whidbey Island. We were there on a Sunday afternoon so there wasn’t that much work going on. The tour is very interesting, especially if you are an engineer, and gives you a good sense of the complexity of those aircraft though you are quite a distance from the work itself. Such a tour also gives you a sense of how many things can go wrong, though the tour didn’t emphasize that aspect. There was no mention of the troubles with the 737 Max, which is built at a different facility. It would be interesting to hear what the company line on that controversy is. You are not allowed to take pictures during the factory tour, understandably. You can get an idea of what it’s like at the Boeing on-line link
After lunch at one of the many Ivar’s seafood restaurants, we took the ferry to Whidbey and checked into our very comfortable Airbnb, which was not far from Clinton, the town where the ferry lands. Our dinner experience was unexpected, and good. We got a few recommendations from our host and also I had looked up a few places on-line beforehand. But it was a Sunday night and all of the places were either full or had very long waits. So we drove around a bit hoping to come upon something and there began to be talk about stopping at a pizza joint or getting take out. Anyway we happened to see a sign for the Freeland cafe and lounge, which has a very unpretentious retro 1950s diner look to it. I don’t think any of us were very optimistic about the place, but we were sort of out of options. Well, it turned out that the mussels and clams were excellent. The waiter said the mussels were from a town nearby. Richard and Grace had just been on an extended tour of Italy with their family and apparently Richard told his kids that the mussels were better than anything they had in Italy.
My original plan was to drive back to Clinton the next morning as Richard and Grace had to catch a flight out of Seattle in the early evening. However, while we were on the ferry, we saw a limo that advertised rides from Whidbey Island to the Seattle airport directly. This seemed like a much better deal since they wouldn’t have to deal with getting a taxi or Uber from the ferry to the train station to catch the light rail to the airport. It also gave us a chance to explore the island a bit before they had to depart. So they made reservations for the limo for a pickup on the northern end of the island, where we had to be to catch our ferry onward to San Juan Island. So we drove slowly north, stopping at the Whidbey lighthouse and a couple other places along the way. The only wrinkle in the plan was that we were not aware that the pickup point they had chosen was on a Naval airbase to which we were not allowed access.. So they hurriedly arranged for another pickup point. This was a good situation for having cell phones. After they were picked up by the limo, Lil and I headed north to Anacortes to catch the ferry for San Juan Island.
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