Day Seven Sep 5, 2000 Tuesday Sacramento to San Francisco We woke up in Sacramento and cruised once around town. We took some pictures then headed west toward San Francisco. Dave's conference was to start this afternoon, with sign-in between 1pm and 3pm, and some small presentations before breaking up for dinner. On the way we stopped at the Jelly Belly factory in Fairfield, California. Then for lunch at Jack-in-the-Box (what else?). Finally, we headed into the city, across the bay bridge, then on to the Hyatt at SFO airport. The Jelly Belly factory was interesting place with another fascination tour. Of course, there was a lot of information about the company history, including its roots in New Jersey and Chicago. Also great presentation on the "other" candies they manufacture including the famous Halloween candy-corn. But the star of the show is the jelly-belly jelly-bean. The tour presented a video and let us look through windows at the processing of the flavored slurry, and the tumbling of it into beans. They spend a lot of time in machines that look a lot like clothes dryers, being tumbled and formed, later being coated. The amazing part of the production sequence was that the beans had to "cure" for several days between original production and completion. Of course, what that means if you think about it, is that several DAYS of production of jelly beans must be sitting around somewhere "aging". Well, not just somewhere, there were racks of trays, like you see in a bakery, each rack ten or more feet tall with individual trays every two or three inches laid out literally everywhere in the plant. What a delightful sight for the eye. Later steps involve sorting out only the proper size beans (too small and too big get packaged and sold as "belly-flops" -- and they are delicious). The most amazing step is that each and every individual bean, millions of them every day, are painted with the trademark "Jelly Belly" logo. We check in the gift shop and, sure enough, every single bean. What a great place to visit. After Dave signed in at his conference and attended a couple of small group presentations, everyone was on their own for dinner. It was an easy decision to catch up with Dave's friend and cohort Jinny, and head down to Fisherman's Wharf for seafood. We ate on the barstools outside Alioto's enjoying the night air and the free music from the street corner musicians. Then walked around the tourist stores in the area, buying T-Shirts and key rings.  Finally, we drove over to Treasure Island (Jinny had never been there even though she's lived for years in the East Bay) and looked at the twinkling city lights of San Francisco. We all had a perfectly delightful evening. Original Web Upload May 2001 Last Update: July 22, 2001