In Between Sacramento & San Francisco

Suisun City, CA. That's where Mike's brother & family live. And the only way I know how to describe where it is? In between Sacramento & San Francisco. Not wanting to spend all of my 3 week vacation filling out law school applications, we decided to go visit Zeke, Natalie, Caroline, Miles, and baby Ivy. We had a lot of fun, and are so grateful for their hospitality! What an eventful trip too!

First off, Ellie needs to be commended for being such a trooper in the car! She only spent 1 of the 12 hours in the car screaming, which was better than I was expecting!

We had fun playing with the kids, going to Larry's produce (which is sort of what I imagine heaven to be like: any kind of fruit and vegetable you can imagine for super cheap!), going to church, picking pomegranates right off the tree, and watching really strange foreign films.

We also went to San Francisco. My favorite part of San Fran was Musee Mecanique: "one of the world's largest privately owned collection of mechanically operated musical instruments and antique arcade machines."
This is "Laffing Sal" and you can pay a quarter to see her come to life and laugh at you. Creepy, yet historical. There were the old fortune telling machines, the arm wrestling machines, marionettes, and mechanical pianos. It had a very old-timey feeling to it, and it was really fun to walk around and see all of the antique games. I kind of wish I lived in the 1930's and could go to the carnival with a pocket full of change and blow all my money on those games. Kind of interesting to see how much entertainment has changed since then!

Right next to the Musee Mecanique is Fisherman's Wharf. Ever since our trip last year, Mike regretted not trying the fresh crab they sell on the wharf, so this year he bought some.

Bleh! No thanks! I don't like eating anything that looks like a spider, but Mike sure enjoyed it! And apparently, the cocktail sauce was to die for!

This is Ellie in her stroller. You can tell by her face that she wasn't all that happy. You see, the entire time we were in San Francisco, it was pouring rain. So she had to stay inside her stroller with the cover up and a blanket on top of her.

And who can go to Suisun City and not stop at the Jelly Belly Factory, which is in the neighboring city of Fairfield?

Their brand new jelly bean flavor is Honey, which was pretty good assuming you like honey. At the end of the tour, they give you a good sized bag of Jelly Bellies, and there's also a Taste Bar, where you can sample any flavor you like. Mike made me try Millipede. It was disgusting.

And just down the street from the Jelly Belly Factory was the Budweiser Factory, so we thought, "Why not?" This tour was a little less exciting. (Although if you drink alcohol, you get 2 free drinks at the beginning of the tour. We had lemonade instead). It was kind of interesting to learn about how they make their beer.

This was a refrigerated building which housed their Fermentation Tanks (I don't know if that's what they're really called), but each of those metal tanks was 72 feet long. This building was massive! Oh, and did I mention there were 4 floors above us with the same thing? The beer ferments in there for 30 days or so before it's ready. Children under 5 could only go on half the tour due to safety reasons with the big machinery so Ellie and I hung out in the gift shop, but Mike said we didn't miss much. Jelly Belly definitely beat out Budweiser in my book!

Ellie also had her first playground experience. Riding zebras...

Rock Climibing...

Monkey bars...

What a stellar facial expression!

We had a great week in California and were sad to leave. We decided to break the trip home in half and spent the night in Winnemucca, Nevada. What a great name! Winnemucca. After striking out at several hotels/motels we finally found a place to spend the night. And speaking of great names, this was called Scott's Shady Corner Motel. Have you ever spent a night where "shady" was part of the name? We figured we had a 1 in 7 chance of making it out of there alive. But we lived to tell the tale.

And that was our trip to California!