Doug and Kerry Hudson in Seattle

Our first port of call in the United States was the city of Seattle, famous for Boeing and Starbucks. We arrived there in the early afternoon, having caught the bus down from Vancouver.

We enjoyed our stay in Seattle. It helped that the hostel was excellent with a spacious common area and a very clean kitchen. However, having just been in Canada, we couldn't help making comparisons between the American and Canadian people. One big difference that immediately struck us was that some Americans are grossly overweight. Within minutes of arriving in the country, we'd been shocked by the sight of a literally enormous woman whose stomach sagged down to her knees, only held up from the ground by the amazing power of lycra.

The other key difference that immediately struck us was that, in stark contrast to the educated and respectful Canadians, Americans are generally rude, arrogant and aggressive.

On our first morning we caught a bus to the Seattle Museum Of Flight, out by Boeing Field. The exhibits covered a whole range from the dreams of flight in early myth, to the early pioneers of flight, through supersonic travel to space flight. It even included an exhibit on air traffic control, which we both found very interesting. It was very detailed, and even featured paper flight progress strips - but thankfully did not go into the details of how they are generated. The exhibit on space flight was also excellent, and we came out in awe of the scale of the achievements it took to put Man on the Moon. Our highlight had to be boarding the original Air Force One, a Boeing 707 exclusively reserved for use by the President of the United States, from Eisenhower onwards. It has since been replaced by a 747, so I guess you could call it Air Force One One. We saw the President's chair, his telephone, and even his toilet! You don't see that every day!

While in Seattle we also met up with Sally who used to work with Kerry at Chase in Bournemouth. We went on an underground tour of the Pioneer Square area of Seattle. We learned all about the humourous and unsavoury aspects of Seattle's history that you won't find in the history books. For example, at one time they had a plague of rats which were spreading bubonic plague. Accordingly, the city fathers agreed to pay ten cents for each rat's tail brought in to them. Until, that is, they discovered that some enterprising scallywags had been breeding rats just for that purpose! Following the tour we went out to dinner and ate burgers and drank beer.

The following day we went on a tour of the Boeing factory at Everett. This is where the 747s are assembled, so you can imagine that the building was pretty huge. In fact, it was probably bigger than that: 500 metres by 1000 metres, the largest building in the world by volume. They gave a list of impressive statistics about how many football pitches you can fit inside etc. Most impressive, we found, was the temperature regulation. They don't need to pay for heating as it is heated by the one million lights, the machines and the body heat of the workers. When it gets too hot, they just open the immense doors until it cools down enough!

Probably our favourite place in Seattle was the Pike Place Market. This was an assault on the senses, as delicious smells and colourful displays of food competed for our attention with the raucous shouts from the store-keepers.

We had a plane to catch though, and very soon we were landing in San Francisco for the next stage of our American adventure: California!

World Trip >> USA >> Seattle

Last updated: Sunday August 27, 2006