Last Hurrah

Lovely start to the day with the Lindbergh Line plane

MUSEUM OF FLIGHT MORNING: This morning we dropped Bee off at AstroGals camp at 9 sharp. However, instead of heading back home, CJ, Rick and I hit a Starbucks and then staked out a spot in The Museum of Flight parking lot.

We were there to see the third and final arrival of NASA's Super Guppy wonder plane, full o' space shuttle trainer parts.

The Guppy is an aeronautics wonder. Everyone who sees it for the first time seems to say the same thing. Rick was no exception. "It looks like a whale!" he marveled as it did a low fly by at 10 a.m.

We saw Bee with her AstroGals classmates come out of the museum to watch the arrival, too.

Though the boys and I left after it taxied to a stop, Annabelle had connections. She got to go to a Q&A session with the pilots. She tells me she was one of the students who got to ask them a question. It was, "How heavy is the Super Guppy?"

The answer "was too big a number to remember," she reports.

In consulting The Google, I learn that Guppy can carry a cargo of 41,000 pounds. It has a wingspan of 156 ft., 3 inches, it's 143 ft., 10 inches long and its height is 46 ft., 5 inches. It also has a face that looks like a dolphin puckering up for a kiss. :) (That last part wasn't on Google.)

There was a relatively small crowd on hand today compared to the first two shuttle trainer deliveries (yes, I saw both of those too), and the Guppy came in from the opposite direction (the south), giving us a different view and a backdrop of Mt. Rainier. Sweet!

NOT AS FUN: This afternoon I worked on the addition while CJ endured watching me bleed and listening to me curse. Ah yes, the joys of home improvement.