Family Vacation - Avenue of Giants (Redwood Forest) & Jelly Belly Factory, Fairfield CA

This was a fun stop. We had "planned" to work Sequoia National Park into our trip, but by this day (abt 5 days into our vacation) we realized that cramming one more bigger day into our week would probably kill us. We considered maybe stopping at Yosemite National Park which is north of Sequoia, but we couldn't jive the timeline with hotels. We had made peace with bagging the idea when we saw a road sign that said "Avenue of Giants" - yeah for a smart phone. We googled it and quickly learned that we were approaching a Redwood park - it didn't have a cool Native American name, but Avenue of Giants seemed to speak to us, so we took the exit and spent an hour in the largest trees we had ever seen!



Once again, we lucked out and had this entire area to ourselves! The kids ran and climbed and walked the pathways...



...they humored mom and posed for frequent snapshots.




Went with B&W because it's forgiving! :) A lot of our pictures were taken with our cell phones and they turned out great for the most part, but if you try to zoom much, it's hard to keep it clear.



As if all of the texting with my Scoutmaster back home wasn't enough on this trip, I had a moment of personal gratitude for Jim, Jr as my Eagle Scout husband, who once had Jim as his Scoutmaster too, sprung into action with a remedy for Stinging Nettle. Use the plants own leaves to relieve the pain! Who knew...besides Jim & Brandon? (Joseph was totally grossed out by this! But very happy to have it work!)



You can take the boy out of the country...



We did it! I don't know how many rings this tree had, but I know it was 22 Lee Arms around!!



Meredith had a love/hate relationship with the forest. She loved it, but only for about 18 seconds. Luckily, I snapped this picture at about 12 seconds!!



We did some more driving south and finally arrived in Fairfield CA where we met up with Brandon's brother Brian and his family at the Jelly Belly Factory.



This portrait is made of Jelly Belly Beans!! Useless trivia: I am a total Royal fanatic! I may start calling my sister Pippa!



These hats serve ZERO purpose! They insist that you wear them through the tour. The tour consists of walking through a totally enclosed hallway that overlooks the factory floor. There is no way on the planet that a hair from any one's head could fall into the Jelly Beans! I just know the tour guides get together on their breaks and compare how dorky their tourists looked! Of course MY tourists looked adorable in their useless hats - I looked absolutely dorkish!




Just because she's so darn cute...