Neales on Wheels: Five Guys Burgers, Museum of Flight & Space Needle

We've spent the last 2 days catching up on things around the RV and paying bills and grocery shopping. I've also been going over to the Food Court at the BX to wi-fi because the Verizon broadband signal is very weak at the campground. Our cell phone service is also weak out there.

We left the campground around 10:30 and stopped at the base gas station to get gas in the Vue ($3.839 a gal) before heading up to Seattle to visit the Museum of Flight and the Space Needle.

In addition to programming our Garmin gps for the Museum of Flight and the Space Needle, I had also entered the address for the Five Guys Burgers in Renton. We've been craving a hamburger from Five Guys since we crossed the border into Washington. The address for Five Guys is on N. 10th Place in Renton and when we got there all we saw was an industrial area and no Five Guys. We wandered around a bit before stopping at a Brown Bear car wash to have the car washed.

We asked one of the workers where Five Guys was located and he gave us directions. It turns out that there are 2 N. 10th Places and Garmin sent us to the wrong one! We found Five Guys in The Landings (a really neat shopping complex) and thoroughly enjoyed our bacon cheese burgers and fries.

After lunch we drove over to the Museum of Flight which is located next to Boeing Field-King County International Airport. The museum is housed in a very impressive glass building.

From Museum of Flight

After paying the senior admittance of $14 each and receiving a map of the museum, we entered the Great Gallery which is a 6-story glass and steel exhibit area just full of aircraft that shows the history of flight.

From Museum of Flight

We next visited the Space Gallery chronicling the history of space flight.

From Museum of Flight

We stopped at the Boeing Red Barn which was the Boeing Company's original manufacturing plant. In the Red Barn we saw a re-created factory workshop and artifacts from the earliest days of aviation including a copy of Orville and Wilbur Wright's Letter of Patent for their Flying Machine.

From Museum of Flight

The next exhibit was the J. Elroy McCaw Personal Courage Wing which has exhibits covering World War I

From Museum of Flight

and World War II.

From Museum of Flight

We walked across the T. Evans Wyckoff Memorial Bridge over to the Airpark.

From Museum of Flight

At the Airpark we were able to walk through a Concorde

From Museum of Flight

and then we boarded the first Presidential jet plane "Air Force One" for Presidents Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon.

From Museum of Flight

We've visited a number of aviation museums and we both agreed that the Museum of Flight has to be one of the best museums we've visited.

We had a great view of Mt. Rainier when we left the museum.

From Seattle

We then drove up to the Space Needle and the area was packed with people. We drove around looking for a place to park and found place on the street a few blocks away from the Space Needle. The rate for parking was $2 a hour and after feeding in all of our change (we didn't want to use a credit card), we had 1 hour 25 minutes.

From Seattle

We walked up to the Space Needle and got in the ticket line a little after 3:30 and found out the wait to go up the Space Needle was 40 minutes and that didn't include the wait in line to buy a ticket. The price for senior tickets is $16 each. Since it was so late in the afternoon, we decided to pass on riding up to the Observation Deck today since we still had an hour's drive back to McChord.

From Seattle

We did visit the Gift Shop and bought some postcards and a couple of souvenirs. There are so many things to see and visit here in Seattle that we'll just have to come back another time and spend more time here.

We got back to the FamCamp at 5:00 and Mike took photos of the dry camping area where we're staying. It is also the storage area and you just pick a vacant spot and park. There are a few sites with numbers but the majority of the area has no campsite numbers.