jelly in my bellys

Sept. 29, 2013

Today dawned warm and sunny for our excursion to the Jelly Belly factory in Fairfield, CA. We filled up on breakfast at our hotel (while having to listen to Americans loudly discuss football and all their favourite players, like ever heard of keeping the volume of your conversation confined to those at YOUR table as opposed to the entire dining room?). Anyways, we found Jelly Belly without incident and found that they were having some sort of festival with kiddie rides, pony rides, and various vendors this weekend. 

We were pretty much the first people in the door at 9:00am, so we decided to do the tour first and check out everything else afterwards. We got paper hats to wear and went through the viewing platform above the production floor where they also had informational videos. 

Unfortunately, because it was Sunday, all the production lines were closed so we didn’t actually see any beans being made L But the videos were interesting and informational (the guy who started the candy company was German, just like the guy who started the Tillamook Cheese company….) and we got a bag of assorted jelly beans on our way out. Of course there was a sizable store selling everything Jelly Belly plus they had a tasting bar where you could try all sorts of flavours, including the nasty ones like vomit and booger (no we did not try these, though we did see a lady ask to try the booger flavour). We did try the Tabasco flavour and Ben’s forehead got all sweaty like it always does when he eats spicy foods. We ended up getting a couple car air fresheners (mostly because they were cheap and smelled yummy), and we got several bags of “Belly-Flops”, which are all the beans that aren’t the perfect size, either too big or too small or misshapen.

After our candy adventure it was back onto the interstate and back to the coast, through some pretty boring landscape of farms. 

To keep ourselves entertained we decided to keep a tally of all the roadkill we saw; we ended the day at 25, but over 10 of those were in the first hour alone, close to Fairfield. There are all these “Adopt-a-highway” signs along the highways so I guess the really nasty areas of road where the garbage, tires and roadkill are out of control are either not adopted areas, or just neglected. Either way, some areas are horribly dirty, we saw at least 4 whole tires, not to mention a plethora of pieces.

Like I said, the landscape was boring and I ended up falling asleep for almost an hour, and I was cranky for a good hour after I woke up. We still had leftover pizza from last night so I put it on the dashboard to warm up a bit.

 It was probably around 2pm by the time we reached Pismo Beach and Ben pulled off the freeway and up to a 4-way stop; while I was busy watching traffic and thinking that it was not our turn to go but Ben was going anyways, the warm pizza flew off the dash and into my lap, this did not do anything to improve my mood. But we found the beach and got out to stretch our legs and get our feet wet in the ocean, which wasn’t as warm as I was expecting. 

We drove around aimlessly for a bit looking for the highway that follows the coastline, but ended up heading back to the 101, which was moving painfully slow through Santa Barbara and we were getting worried that it was going to be like that all the way to LA. I could tell that Ben was getting cranky because of all the stop and go traffic and because he had been driving all day. We ended up pulling off at a random outlet mall and walking around for about an hour to stretch our legs. Ben ended up buying a pair of shorts that actually fit him.

Then it was on the road again. It was dark by the time we were driving through LA to our motel in Long Beach and the traffic was horrible. We were in the HOV lane which was moving pretty good, but parts of it had no shoulder as there was a concrete median right on the shoulder line and we were both pretty tense and stressed and ready to get out of the car. Our motel was this weird little place with a disproportionately large bathroom, but it was clean and cheap and we were only staying one night. We were both hungry (and by that I mean that I was hungry and Ben denied being hungry), so we went to look for some food. At night the area we were staying in seemed kinda sketchy but we managed to find a Subway. The Subways down here are so much better, their $5 footlong menu is pretty much any sub. We both ended up getting footlongs so we could have half for tomorrow. Pretty much as soon as Ben saw his sandwich dream becoming a reality he confessed that he was starving (how does that work I wonder?). We went back to our motel to devour our sandwiches in peace and away from the panhandler loitering outside of the Subway.