Day 10. After a leasurely breakfast we headed south to drive the length of Whidbey Island the longest island in the USA. We zig-zagged around a bit to see the coast and eventually arrived at Clinton at the south east of the island to catch the ferry back to the mainland.

The short ferry ride across to Mukilteo was short but good fun. There was a hell of a wind blowing straight at the front of the ferry and my boys had a great time arms spread out wide leaning at a crazy angle into the wind. Once across the other side we drove up the steep hill and stopped near the top in a diner for lunch.

Suitably refreshed we drove the next couple of miles to Everett and the Boeing factory tour. The tour was very good but not as detailed as I would have liked. I guess they are not going to show half the world all the interesting techincal manufacturing details I wanted too see. However, the breeze through the gigantic assembly hall was deeply impressive.

After seeing so many natural wonders it was good to see one of the man made wonders of the world. The main assembly building at Everett where the 747, 767 and 777's are constructed is the biggest enclosed space in the world. The guide rattled off a series of statistics demonstrating how large the building is, like you could fit 911 basket ball courts in it or 75 NFL football fields. These sounded big but did not really hit me. He then said that you could fit the whole of DisneyLand (Anehiem Los Angeles) into the building and still have some room left for a car park...... Wow!!!!!!! I've spent many hours trudging round DisneyLand in the three times we've been over the years and this really brought it home to me how large this building is.

After a visit to the gift shop we hit the I5 south towards Seattle. It was dreadful. Boiling hot and ever increasing traffic on the road until we hit almost total gridlock as we entered the edge of Seattle. On the map it looked like we could leave the interstate and get a parallel road to near the airport where we were due to stay that night. Once we had crawled for enough, off we went at the next intersection into much freer flowing traffic - good decision we thought until....... our road sailed over our target road on a bridge with no way off it. We had a to travel a long way before we could begin to head in the direction of the airport. Once we had deciphered the very logical road naming convention we quickly negotiated the western suberbs of Seattle and found our hotel.

Fairly early to bed to get up in time for the flight the following morning we spent our last night in the magnificent north west of the USA