Marc's Public Blog - Trips

2010/08/25 Fly Out Group trip to Seattle and the San Juan Islands

π 2010-08-25 01:01 in Flying, Nflying, Ntrips, Trips

Dan Dyer organized another fly out group trip, this time ot the San Juan Islands. It was a nice trip.

Palo Alto to Boeing Field

Jennifer wasn't able to join due to work commitments, but I found a copilot to go with and share the flying. I did the first leg to KBFI (Boeing Field International) which was an easy 5H leg with nice weather.

good old thunderhill, I'll be back soon :)

argh, all this for junkmail I never asked for :(

viewing platform for Mt St Helens

Mt St Helens

KBFI/Boeing Field

Museum of Aviation visible on the left of the runway

Boeing Museum of Flight

Since we were there already, we went to visit the Boeing Museum of Flight at KBFI. It's actually one of the best flight museums I've seen so far: a full visit takes over 4H and even a quick one takes over 2H :)

I had no idea the concorde had an anti tailstrike tailwheel

Their warbird collection was quite good and well layed out

old vs new is fun to see :)

old french plane

a rare A12/M21 with D21 drone

the drone was supposed to launch with nukes in unfriendly territory

Seattle

I spent the rest of the afternoon visiting Seattle

the smith tower is a nice view open later than the BOA tower and better view than the space needle

BofA tower

underground bus system

monorail to space needle

lots of work to 'drive' it :)

Smith tower on the right

a seaplane was doing patterns with passengers on the nearby lake

Mt Rainier in the back

Dinner with FOG folks

Boeing Factory

The next morning, weather was bad, so we just drove to KPAE to visit the Boeing Museum. Unfortunately, we were not allowed to take any pictures of the factory floor. This is too bad since it was pretty cool to see 787s and 747s being built from scratch on huge floors.
We were able to take pictures of the static displays and planes seen from the outside though:

Flying Heritage Museum

On the way out, I had a look at Paul Allen's private Flying Heritate Museum. It's actually a pretty nice little collection with knowledgeable guides.

Flight to Friday Harbour

Weather still wasn't great, but it was VFR in Boeing field and Friday Harbour, so we figured we'd be able to link the two somehow. It wasn't a very straight line, but we ended up doing a safe, albeit a bit silly considering, VFR on top flight where we climbed over 10,000ft to clear the clouds and leave the cloud area around Seattle. An other flight was able to get there between layers but I didn't find such a path and just didn't wan tot be scud runnings with no so flat land around.

cool shadow of our plane in the clouds with a rainbow around it. Neat!

little island just next to Lopez Island, pretty cool.

Orcas Island

Friday Harbour

Visit of San Juan Island

I used the rest of the day to start visiting San Juan.

whale museum

recent whale sightings

another FOG dinner

Kayaking off San Juan

The second day, I went kayaking in case we could be lucky and see orca whales.

Looking for Orca Whales

Since kayaking didn't work, I went on a boat ride, which makes things easier since there are boats keeping track of orca whale sightings. We indeed found some Orcas just by the Canadian border.

they have a catalog of local orcas

we saw a few orcas after a long boat trip

Before leaving friday harbour, we biked around the island a bit:

Quick Flight to Orcas Island

After biking around the Island, we flew to Orcas Island for lunch:

Flight Back to Palo Alto

And after a late lunch at Orcas Island, we flew back to Palo Alto.

looks like a fun track

Portland

more Portland

making sure my blood O2 saturation was still good at altitude

As predicted by my skypad with XM weather, weather got a worse as we were about to enter California and got closer to Mt Shasta. We had to make a sharp westbound turn and fly around it to stay VFR on top (I had no interest in getting under the cloud layer and being sandwiched between it, and the rising terrain, or ending up in a box canyon).

while in our way, the cloud made a nice wave, like surfing inside a crashing wave (this was just as we turned west)

we then got some nice VFR on top all the way back

and by Oakland, we got under the forming overcast that was starting to cover the bay (incidently, not Palo Alto yet)

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Since my dad was visiting and he had seen Disneyworld in the early, and then later days, he was curious to see Disneyland today, since it was the first park he had never seen.

While I was not in a huge hurry myself, I figured why not? so there we went after a reasonably short flight directly to fullertown airport just 10mn from Disney (closer than LAX and all that crap).

Disneyland

I'll give the summary first:

The roller coasters, as expected, were not very impressive, but then again it's never been Disney's forte. Space Mountain was otherwise decent.

I was really dreading the "it's a small world" rides with dancing puppets everywhere. There were a few, we did 2 and missed 2 (we otherwise did pretty much all the attractions), and it wasn't as bad as I had feared.

They were open from 07:00 to 00:00, so 17 hours is actually a lot of time to visit the park if you want to be gung ho about it.

We were able to pretty much do all of Disneyland in 1.3 days without pushing horribly (if you really do opening to close, it's likely doable in one day with intelligent use of fastpass).

Fastpass is not that bad an idea: you can register for one and only one ride in advance and get a time 1 to 4 hours from now, and then come back later when your time has come and get in with almost no line. That was useful for Space Mountain for instance. You just have to keep in mind that you may not want your fastpass blocked for 4 hours when you could do 2 other 2H wait only fastpass rides during that time.

Disneyland actually has a mobile online website where you can check ride wait times with your cell phone without having to go check them out. Neat!

All in all, I don't think we stood in line for more than 10mn for most rides. Maybe 20mn for one, and that was it. This was most unexpected (that was both use of fastpass, intelligent ride scheduling, and the fact that they were just not that busy on August weekdays, which was a good surprise).

Anyway, here are the picts:

moderately happy with the ride :)

Random pictures:

The Jedi Training Show was actually fairly good:

But Asimo in futureland was very cool, I had never seen it in person:

More random pictures:

California Adventure Park

Half morning on the second day, we were done with Disneyland and headed toward California Adventure Park. I went to pick up some fastpass spots for the 2nd World of Color show (which turns out to only be the right to stand in line almost 1H to get a standing spot somewhere in front of the water, not necessarily with a good view of the show. Thankfully we later scored some VIP standing spots after getting dinner at a local restaurant.

Anyway, back to California Adventure:

The animated rotated animation lit by strobe was really cool (looks better in real life than my camera video where it flashes a lot, but it gives you an idea):

We also got a cartoon drawing class:

ok, I won't quit my day job :)

Some rides are really good decors, I was impressed:

They also had a really well made Simbad Musical:

More random pictures:

this was a fun elevator ride up and down

The new 4D shooting show was quite fun

My high score, and my dad's

This is the waterfront where the world of color show takes place, it's actually pretty nice:

And we finished the day with the California Adventure World of Color Show. It was actually quite pretty, and cool to display video on water:

It was a packed two days, but we pretty much got to see everything in both parks, which for my dad is actually a really good job :)
Good fun was had by all as they say.

Disney seen from the sky.

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Disneyland

California Adventure Park