HARELINES

LONDON TO SYDNEY AND EVER ONWARDS AND UPWARDS

(or round-and-round, there and back, etc.)

by David Hare

Tuesday 8th May 2001: Stranded in Seattle.

It was too good to last! No major mechanical problems, more than half way round, now this!

In the course of our fifty hour check at Boeing Field, a leaking fuel cell in the left wing was discovered. Or rather, it wasn't. The telltale staining on the underside of the wing clearly indicated the presence of a leak somewhere - but where? This was the state on Friday evening, and it still is the state today, Monday. We already have one tank out of the aircraft, and it isn't obviously that one, but it has yet to be pressure tested, or whatever they do, before we take the other one out. Or dismantle the tip tank. So we shan't now be out of here and on the way before Thursday. If you've time to spare.............................

Well, things are tough all over. Lucky we didn't find it in Adak! (It wasn't there.) Margaret is safely back in England, but it's a bit tough on Mandy, having come all this way to keep me company across America, and it now looks as if she'll have to fly back to the UK on Friday without leaving the ground in a proper aeroplane. Unless you count helicopters. Many people do.

The story behind that is that when it became obvious we wouldn't be leaving Seattle on Saturday, as intended, we hired a car and went to Vancouver for the weekend, Mandy kindly relieving me of driving duties. A pleasant interlude, apart from the obvious frustration. We did all the tourist things; Harbour Boat Tour, complete with harbour seals, Grouse Mountain by cable car, Capilano Suspension Bridge (no, I hadn't either, or if I had I'd forgotten) which stretches across a ravine where the original builders owned land on both sides, and took a helicopter ride among the peaks. Very spectacular, and again I found myself thinking there's something to be said for helicopters after all, even if they are engines of Satan. Thanks again, Brendan. "Suspension Bridge" must have a local technical meaning: it's strung across the ravine on it's own cables, rather than being actually suspended. Sways a bit in the middle.

Vancouver has been given back to the "First Nation", in this case the Squamish tribe, and the City pays rent for it, which makes the Squamish the richest nation in Canada. Good for them. I wonder where one applies for naturalisation? Another interesting thing about Vancouver is the almost total lack of public transport and litter - not that the two are necessarily connected. I've no idea of the reason for the former, but the latter is at least partially explained by an ingenious school system, under which every class devotes one period per week gathering in any litter left in it's immediate neighbourhood. Thus the children are brought up not to leave litter in case they get to pick it up later, and it seems the habit persists.

So we (or rather Mandy) drove back to Seattle this morning, Denny's breakfast en route, to discover we wouldn't be leaving just yet. Having been here last week, we've done the Museum of Flight and the Space Needle, so heel kicking not being an option, we're making plans for Mounts St. Helens and Rainier, Whale watching, Cascades National Park, Dame Edna is in Town, and we may have brunch again at Seattle's most famous diner, the Thirteen Coins. There's a Denny's quite close, too.

Progress will be reported later, when hopefully we'll have better news of Red Tape.

Mandy on the Bridge of Sways

View from Helicopter

View from Cable Car