Sweetest Place On Earth

Yesterday, my mom and I spent the day in Hershey Park.  You know what is fun…not going to work and instead spending the day at Chocolate World. 🙂

Every year my mom and I take a hooky day from work and spend the day shopping. Some years we just do the malls, some years we went to Atlantic City; this year we had planned to go up to the Hershey Outlets.  I say had, because it wasn’t long before we decided to ditch the shopping idea and spend the day at Chocolate World instead!

We headed down as soon as I got home from work on Monday night.  The drive was harrowing to say the least!!!  Look, I am from South Jersey…hills don’t exactly exist here and winding roads aren’t all that popular either.  Oh, and here, we light our roads.  So yeah, I was more than happy when we finally made it to the hotel!

So we get to the hotel and as we walk in, I see this display and notice it has my mom’s name on it!  Turns out, my mom was Guest Of The Day 🙂  We got our room upgraded to a suite!  And because my mom and I are total dorks, we totally took pictures!

Once we were settled in, we headed out to get some dinner; we were both totally starving and on a recommendation we went to the Chocolate Pantry.  This place was super cute and the food was delicious!!!  Our eyes were WAY bigger than our stomachs and we ended up with an appetizer of crab fries, side salads and our meals.  Our amazing meals- italian chicken and pasta for me and crab cakes for my mom.  (We later left these meals in the fridge at the hotel 😦 )  We really enjoyed our dinner and the place; I would highly recommend it!

From dinner it was back to the hotel and bed in preparation for a fun day at Chocolate World.  Let me just say, that from the time we stepped foot in that place on Tuesday morning we were like two little kids.  We were so excited we didn’t even know where to begin!  The last time we were in Hershey, I was about 12 and things have changed quite a lot!  Thankfully, the world’s nicest people work at their front desks and were happy t0 give us some direction.

We decided to first make our own candy bars.  This was a blast- it was only my Mom and I, so our tour guide Kim was our personal guide 🙂  Kim was awesome- so sweet and friendly (and origonally from south jersey!!) and you could tell she really likes her job.  Making your own candy bar is some serious business;  you are in the real factory so you have to wear hairnets and aprons and take off all jewlery.  You start with a plain chocolate bar (I chose dark) and then you get to choose three inclusions and a topping.  My inclusions were white chocolate chips, pretzels and toffee with Christmas sprinkles as my topping.  After you program your bar, you get to watch it be made.  And from there you get to design your wrapper.  The whole process takes about 30 minutes and is so much fun.  I highly recommend this for all ages 🙂

From there we headed through the free ride through how chocolate is made- its totally cute and you get free chocolate at the end 🙂  After that we headed to the trolley to take a ride through Hershey.  This was by far my favorite part of the trip; it was informative and fun.  We had a very charismatic trolley guide and again, like Kim, you could tell how much he liked his job.  While talking, you could see that he took pride in working for Hershey.  And even though I know quite a bit about Hershey, having done a paper my senior year on him, I really learned a lot.  Even with the rain, it was a great ride.  I especially loved being able to go through the Hersey School grounds and into the Rotunda building where we saw the gorgeous dome with all the flags.  Plus, the Christmas tree was up and it was beautiful.

After the trolley, we decided to round out our trip by seeing the 3D movie.  It was about 20 minutes long and obviously geared towards kids, but we still both really liked it a lot.  3D is fun!

The last thing on our list was to make the candy bar wrappers.  I made one for a friend and my mom made one for co-worker.  Then we made a Hershey Syrup bottle for my dad.  It was fun but it was also the one thing that could have been better; they really need a better system.  For one, they should take more than one photo and let you pick…we lucked out and got good photos but it still would have been nice to have a choice.  Additionally, the wrappers were not put on very well.  It’s a small complaint and it wouldn’t keep me from doing it again or recommending the activity.

When we were all finished with the days activities we went into the shops and spent way too much money on chocolate 🙂  Then we headed home, stopping on the way at Bertucci’s for dinner.  It was a super, much-needed, awesome overnight trip.

Oh…and if you are curious…in the world of working out…well, I have been absent big time.  I hope you will all stick with me through my off-time whilst I get my ish together!