With SeaFair last weekend (and I only just managed to get through the 2000 or so photos taken last week so yeah this is a bit late) it was a big weekend for a plane spotter. I was planning on heading out on both the Saturday and the Sunday. I wanted at least one day at Boeing Field for the take off & landing shows etc that are conducted by the aircraft and the second day, somewhere by the lake. I had done a lot of planning to head out onto the I-90 bridge high rises this year, but that never happened.
Saturday went pretty damn good, ok well it went pretty good, there were certainly moments that I did not see coming. Heidi was with me most of the day and we had a blast. We spent a bit of the morning at the Museum of Flight, checking out the Marine Corp equipment spread around. Heidi actually enjoyed herself more than I expected, so that was a huge suprise. I know she was looking for plenty of men in uniform, and she certainly got that wish… but no dress uniforms… thankfully. Wierdest moment of the day happened while looking over the Osprey we had just about to walk over to get a bit closer when all of a sudden the skies opened. The rain started pouring down, so we took shelter under the wing, along with a couple of the crew of the aircraft. They joked that the Osprey comes with it’s own rain prevention system (aka… the wing) and when it started coming down harder, we fled to the inside of the aircraft. About a minute or so after getting in out of the rain, it began to hail. My first thought was OMG THE TRUCK!, but then it was more.. WHAT THE HELL IT IS HAILING! A freak storm had come out of no where and the aircraft was getting pelted with small pieces of hail.
After some time at the Museum of Flight we headed around to the far side of the airport, onto the Boeing Access Road (that’s the actual street name, not a private road, we weren’t breaking any laws :P) and parked along the fence line. Thanks to having a truck I could get up above the fence height without needing a ladder or having to try and scramble over people. We could also sit out in the sun and enjoy the day (since it wasn’t all that bad), although that would later turn out to be my downfall. I got heaps of great shots as the Patriots came and went, the Marines all started to wait, then just as the last of them started to head out… another freak hail storm hit. Right as the Hornets got clearance for take off, it came out of no where dumping hail everywhere… take a look for yourself. Here they are just prior to clearance:
Then moments later
I was up there for as long as I could, and got a little bit drenched. At first I didn’t know it was hail and was more worried about all the windows of the truck being open. Didn’t end up needing to worry that much as by the time I got into the truck, it was well and truly finished. Back outside I went! After all was said and done I wasn’t that badly burnt and had a metric butt load of photos (ok around 1200 or so) but by the end of the day I was totally wrecked. I had been up since around 530am since I was at MoF really early to get some photo work done for the blog when no one was around. I woke up the Sunday morning with no energy at all!! I could barely move so I ended up staying around the house. I had dehydrated myself pretty badly it seemed (I didn’t think so at the time) so I just stayed home. I ended up missing out on a second day by the lake, but I did manage to get a lot of photos already processed (well at least the ones I took early last week)
Right now there is one thing I know you really want…. photos! So take a look here but you can find the rest at my main photo folder on Picasa
