In Jail

A trip to Alcatraz is THE thing to do in San Fransisco, so much so that the ferry is fully booked for a week, I bought tickets before we left, of course and we enjoyed a brief trip across the bay to the "rock" 

We visited Eastern state penitentiary in Philly a few years ago and it was quiet and spooky, this is more touristy and noisy, with audio tour headphones on there were crowds of people standing vacantly listening to the tour but when you could get to see inside cells and buildings it was interesting, I have taken a few photos in multi exposure to process when I get home but here are the highlights..............

The island is a bird sanctuary as well and we were greeted by a couple  of the residents!

There was an exhibition by Ai weiwei as well, some of the pieces were just small stones filling loos and baisins but one of the better ones was the dragon

No photos please

In the railroad museum we found a leaflet for the Jelly belly factory tour...........

  Just the thing for an ex food factory person and an engineer with the added bonus of jelly beans! Years ago we visited the wedgewood factory and found it fascinating so always up for wandering round more factories, even if half the queue was kiddies. I usually try to avoid doing things that are obviously kiddie activities, I see more than enough children at work and like a break from it. Unfortunately in my job which involves children and food neither are easily avoided. 

Jelly bean "art"

The tour was great, plenty of chances to peer at the factory and the jelly beans, we were told no photography which was a shame but since the guide asked everyone to keep an eye out for others taking photos and report them it was a bit difficult. 

The things that I would have liked to have shown here ..........

- rows of stainless steel drums like cement mixers which are used to coat the jelly beans

- the stacked crates of brightly coloured jelly bean centres waiting for the next stage

- the shelves of chemicals the go into the colour and flavourings

- the filling machine from above, with multicoloured beans, it looked like a jelly bean flower!

instead all I have is this from when I had my phone out- you can probably get the gist of the scale from it 

  

Jelly Belly beans are expensive at home and they are still expensive here so we bought a couple of small bags and had a good poke around the shop

The peas and carrots are jelly beans too, probably the only "veg" consumed by some!

Back over the bridge

Funnel cake

Soo in the quest for something we both like looking at we drove to Sacramento to see big trains!

The museum in Sacramento had a whole load of trains, all scrubbed and neatly standing, to be honest I prefer my trains grubby and standing outside but there is nothing like standing next to a massive piece of engineering and imagining it thundering across the plains 100 years ago it must have been a scary sight!

Even the really old examples were clean, some poor buffalo would have come to grief with the cattle scoop on the front , this is still in the days before the Native Americans had been killed off and confined to reservations, the railways were built by Chinese forced labour, the history of North American railways is not one of sparkling human rights.

I quite liked the quirky models and toys upstairs, I am not a fan  of model railways but the rest was interesting.

State Fair
As far as I can tell, most states have a state fairground where various events are held each year, they are used for RV camping some of the time and the rest of the time they just sit there. The State fair seems to be an excuse to eat as much as possible, obviously there are the show categories from cattle to crochet and most things in between. Anyway, legendary among the state fair culinary offerings is the fried food, like these from a little shop near the museum

Funnel cake is a delicacy, in fact its practically a religion, the idea is that batter is drizzled into a fryer through a funnel and then served with ice cream or something equally calorie laden

its a big thing  ...........

No dont worry, we shared it!