Sweet Endings

Yesterday was our long trip home. We checked out of our hotel around 9:00 and drove toward the Oakland Bay Bridge. It was fun to be able to drive on this double decker bridge which is quite a bit longer than the Golden Gate Bridge. It even has an exit to Treasure Island while you are in the middle of the bridge still driving over the bay. On our way to the bridge, we drove up several steep hills and renamed the Little Red Car, to The Little Red Car That Could. We weren't sure we'd make it, but it always got us to the top of each hill (barely).

It was about an hour drive northeast to Fairfield, California, the home of the Jelly Belly Factory. We stopped for breakfast at the slowest Denny's I've ever been to, but eventually we were parking and walking (well, I was still hobbling) into the visitor center. The line was long, but I wasn't going to turn back now. It was about a 45-minute wait for our 45-minute tour of the working factory. We walked above the factory looking through glass windows and watching different videos explaining the history and process. We got to see people working in the different stages: mixing, flavoring, coloring, molding, polishing, sorting, packaging, and shipping. We saw conveyer belts, robots, and billions of jelly beans. We also got to taste a jelly bean in the three stages of it's formation. It was fun and educational.

Marilyn in Jelly Bellies

One other interesting tidbit of the tour was the art gallery. There were dozens of portraits of famous people all completed in the style of mosaics, but with Jelly Bellies instead of tile. It was pretty impressive. President Reagan was featured a lot in the portraits. After all, he was the president that put Jelly Belly on the map.

It was time to start the trip back home. So we strapped ourselves in and headed south. This time we took the quicker, but more boring trip down the I-5. On the trip we listened to the audiobook Ender's Game so that helped to pass the time and we finished it about an hour away from home. We pulled into the driveway at 11:45 p.m. exhausted and happy to sleep in our own beds once again.

It was a fun trip for me. I got to vacation one more time with my three sons. I thought last year would be the last time we got to do this, so this trip was an added bonus. I got to see many parts of Northern California that I've been wanting to see. I got to learn something new. I even got to purchase some license plates that I was missing (including a California one). Yep. I'm pretty happy.