PHOTOS: Yakima, WA

Back in October, we went with Bethany's family to Yakima, WA to visit relatives and check out various orchards during apple season. It's about a two and a half hour drive to Yakima from our home in Kent and the drive was made humorous by using the Terry Crews voice feature on the Waze GPS app. There's nothing like him yelling at you, "AT THE ROUND-A-BOUT, CONTINUE STRAIGHT!!!"

We met with lots of Bethany's family at Miner's Drive-In, which is a popular local fast food joint.

Miner's has been around since 1948. Good burgers and shakes, but the prices have gone up.

The first orchard we went to was at Thompson's Farm in Naches, WA. They had a huge variety of different apples to pick. Some of them rather large like this one that Coral is holding.

Juliana reaching up on a ladder to pick a ripe apple off the tree. I think Thompson's had 6 or 7 varieties to pick.

I think the price here was 50 cents per pound, which is a screamin' deal compared to what we pay back home for apples.

Coral enjoyed running all over the place.

Our haul from Thompson's. Bethany will be making apple butter and apple pie filling with most of these.

Bethany carrying our apples to the cashier.

The next place we visited was Barrett Orchards in Yakima. They had a hay maze set up for kids and of course ours enjoyed running through it multiple times.

Juliana on a big tractor at the orchards.

I think they like each other.

One of our fall family pictures.

Our main reason for going to Barrett Orchards was because they do an old fashioned cider squeeze.

The first thing you have to do is pick your apples and clean them in big buckets of water.

Then you dump them into the apple press, where it grinds them all up. A photographer took a picture at the same time as this one and Julie ended up in the Yakima Herald-Republic newspaper.

The apple bits then look like this.

Then you squeeze the living bejeezus out of them. This apple press is 139 years old.

The juice is then filtered and then put in jugs. Super fun and very yummy! You should do it sometime if you ever get the chance.

Then we all rode on the hay ride through the orchards. Most of their fruit was not in season, except for the apples and pumpkins. Would be nice to return sometime to pick peaches and cherries.

We also went out to the Zillah for some wine tasting. This is the vineyard at Silver Lake Winery, which is Washington's largest owned consumer winery.

There were lots of grapes on the vines. I snagged a few at another winery and tasted them. They are super sweet!

Another winery we went to called Paradisos del Sol had a cute garden and I got a good shot of a bee sitting on a flower.

Overall, we had an enjoyable time and will probably make it out there again someday. To see all 91 pictures from our little trip, check out this Flickr set.