AHHH Chocolate

What better way to spend a day than surrounded by chocolate...












You can't spend four days in Hershey Pennsylvania and not think about chocolate. It's everywhere. It's on the name of the streets Cocoa Road and Chocolate Avenue.

It's on the street lights in town.  It's in the name of so many stores in town. The one place it wasn't, was in the air. I thought that the whole town would smell of chocolate. (Those of you who have been through Burlington Wisconsin and the Nestle factory know what I'm talking about.)

Our first stop in Hershey was to the visitors center to find out what to do and how to do it. We wanted to get a tour of the factory and learn how they make all those delectable treats. We were also hoping for some free samples!

Much to our dismay, there are no actual tours of the factory. However, you can go to Hershey's Chocolate World Attraction. Here you have your choice of five different tours that you can go on...all for a price. As we were walking toward the building, we noticed these two lines of people. They WERE giving away free samples!!!

One line was to get samples of two different types of cookies (chocolate chip or cookies and cream), the other for two different types of cupcakes (chocolate or choco/peanut butter). You got to pick two for your tasting. The other line was giving away the mixes that you used to make the above samples. Each bag contained two box mixes and a can of frosting. We each got a bag, so I guess I'll be doing some baking when we are in Branson.

The first thing that we opted to see was  the Hershey's Great American Chocolate Factory Tour Ride. This is Hershey's version of Disney's It's a Small World Ride. I'm surprised the workers don't go crazy hearing the same silly song all day long. The ride lasted all of fifteen minutes. You sit in a car and are taken through the steps of making chocolate, mostly narrated by a trio of singing cows. It was during the ride that they puff the smell of chocolate to you.

After our tour we had a 45 minute break before we could see the 4D movie. As we were exiting the tour, a person approached us and wanted to know if we would like to participate in a market survey. I was the only one that could do it. It appears that Hershey doesn't care what the over 64 year old's think of their product. Though they were nice enough to let Fred join me while I did the survey.

It was such a hard job, but someone had to do it. I had to test three, count them three different types of chocolate syrup over ice cream. That means I HAD to eat three scopes of ice cream with chocolate sauce. The first thing I had to do was to determine which of the three samples poured onto my ice cream differently. Then I had to determine if the one that poured differently tasted different from the other two samples. Once I  answered the questions from the survey, I could eat all three dishes of ice cream. Now, the whole time that I was doing this Fred was watching me. I could not stand the sad puppy dog look that he kept giving me because he was to old to participate in the survey, so I actually let him finish one bowl of my ice cream.  See, I am a nice person!!!

We both received a full size Hershey Milk Chocolate Candy bar as a thank you for doing the survey.

Our next adventure in chocolate was to see the 4D movie. (normal 3D but with smellavision!!!). It was really a movie for children, but since we are all kids at heart (and it was part of our package) we went to see it. The movie was cute, the special effects good and the smell of chocolate was    w o n d e r f u l.

The last thing that we did was "Create Your Own Candy Bar". Fred made a candy bar for the Wang grandkids and I made a bar for the Knapp grandchildren. Because this was a working factory, we did have to wear the appropriate clothing. Once properly attired we proceeded into the factory area to begin production. The first step was to select the base for the candy bar. The choices were milk chocolate, dark chocolate or white chocolate. Then we selected a filling: nuts, chocolate chips, pretzel pieces, and a few other choices I can't remember. All bars get a chocolate glazed topping and finally, the biggest decision with or without sprinkles. Once selected you watched the computerized machinery make your candy.

While the candy bar is in the quick chiller, you go to the computer and design the packaging. It was fun, except when we bought the ticket, they misspelled the Knapp's name, and there was no way to correct it on the computer, so I couldn't use their name in the packaging. But it was still a lot of fun, and I really don't think the grandchildren minded. The chocolate was/is the most important part!!

It was lots of fun.








A tour of any place is not complete without a trip to the Gift Shop, and Hershey has a BIG gift shop. We could have bought t shirts, sweatshirts, caps, nightgowns and every type and size of Hershey candy that you could imagine, but we did use some self control and did not leave our life savings to the Hershey Company.