Arlington, WA
Home of the Arlington Fly-In, third-largest aviation gathering in the U.S. after Oshkosh and Sun 'n Fun. Held every July, it draws 1,000+ aircraft and 30,000 spectators to celebrate experimental, vintage, and warbird aviation. The Glasair Aviation factory is on the field — they've built kit airplanes here for decades. KAWO sits in the Stillaguamish River valley with the North Cascades rising to the east. WWII Naval Auxiliary Air Station; the 1942 hangars still stand. About an hour north of Seattle and a frequent stopover for pilots heading to the San Juans or Canada.
On the south side of KPAE Paine Field. The Boeing Everett Factory is the largest building in the world by volume — 472 million cubic feet, 98.3 acres under one roof, with its own internal weather (yes, occasional indoor clouds early in its history). Built 1967 to assemble the 747 after Boeing literally bet the company on the program. Every wide-body Boeing since (747, 767, 777, 787) was built here. In July 2026 the factory also began assembling the 737 MAX; the North Line is Boeing's fourth 737 line and the first outside the jet's longtime home at Renton. The Future of Flight Aviation Center runs the public factory tour — the only public access to a major commercial airliner assembly line in North America. The center has its own gallery of cockpits, components, and Boeing history. Tour times sell out — book ahead.
Each April the flat farmland of the Skagit Valley turns into broad stripes of red, yellow, and purple as millions of tulips bloom; it is the largest tulip-growing district in the country and draws the month-long Skagit Valley Tulip Festival. The rest of the year it is ordinary delta farmland. The bloom is brief and weather-dependent, roughly late March into April.
Deception Pass is the narrow saltwater channel between Fidalgo and Whidbey islands, spanned since 1935 by a pair of steel bridges that leap across Pass Island about 180 feet above the water. The tide forces huge volumes of Puget Sound through the gap twice a day, and the current below churns into visible standing waves and whirlpools. It is one of the most photographed spots in Washington.
Port Townsend is a Victorian seaport frozen in the 1890s, a boomtown that expected to be the region's great harbor and kept its brick downtown and hilltop mansions when the railroad went elsewhere. On the bluff above sits Fort Worden, an early-1900s coastal artillery post that anchored the "Triangle of Fire" guarding the entrance to Puget Sound alongside Fort Casey and Fort Flagler. The fort is now a state park; An Officer and a Gentleman was filmed there.