Hershey Gardens

Before we left Hershey, we had to stop at Hershey Gardens because they're beautiful and I'd been thinking about them ever since I first went there ten years ago.



There's Hershey Park in the not-too-far distance!


Roses are my favorite flower, which is one of the reasons I love Hershey Gardens.



{Prepare to be visually assaulted by roses! I can think of no better assault than that!}







Pale pink roses are my most favorite of all.

  

 Milton Hershey has his own rose! I guess he deserves it. :-)

What better companion to roses and flowers than butterflies? 

The kids enjoyed playing in The Children's Garden. They did a scavenger hunt there with Peter while I wandered around on my own throughout the Gardens.

I love tree-dappled sunshine.

 I spotted two owls! Hoo-Hoo!

 Hershey kiss

That beautiful building in the background is the Hotel Hershey. It's such a classy place. Peter and I spent a wonderful day there when we were in Hershey ten years ago at their amazing spa (where I took a warm foaming cocoa bath and then got a heavenly massage with cocoa-scented oil), followed by a delicious dinner in their very elegant dining room, and then we spent the most peaceful evening afterwards walking around the beautiful grounds. I'd definitely like to stay there sometime.

Hershey was a wonderful detour on our trip, one that I hope we'll repeat again in the future.
But it was time to move on to our final destintion--Massachusetts!

This post was fun! It involved "a few of my favorite things" -- roses, owls, butterflies, and the Hotel Hershey. 

And I guess my kids too. ;-)

The Best Fireworks Pictures I've Ever Taken

We spent a sweet and memorable Fourth of July in Hershey, Pennsylvania, and at the end of the day, we were able to watch fireworks with thousands of other people right from the parking lot of Hershey Park, where we'd spent the day. 

Our view was good but there was a big light and some stadium stuff that made the views less than perfect. Nevertheless, as the title of this post says, I was able to get "the best fireworks pictures I've ever taken"!

It was a great show, so it was worth the literal parking lot we had to sit in for an hour when it was finished due to thousands of people trying to leave at the same time!

This one looks cosmic! 

Looks like a fireworks flower to me!

Happy Fourth of July!

{Even though it's October 16th!}

Our Very Own Hershey Bars

One of the most unique things we did at Chocolate World was to design our own customized Hershey bars and watch them get made. It was really cool! I've always been interested in seeing how things are made, so it really was a special treat (no pun intended!).

"We're gonna make it after all!" 

(Bonus points for you if you know where that's from!) 

On touch screens we each chose our own fillings, type of chocolate, and sprinkles or no sprinkles.

Then we watched our bars get made in the factory line. You knew which bar was yours because it would say on a screen as you walked along following it get made. 

There's my bar! It just got a bunch of nuts sprinkled in it.

After getting their fillings, the bars go through my favorite kind of machine--a chocolate-enrobing machine!

Then if you chose sprinkles, they get sprinkled on while the chocolate is still wet.

Along the way you stop at a different set of touch-screens and design a custom wrapper for your bar. 

Almost done!

After the bars are finished, they get packaged up and placed in a silver Hershey box, which then gets wrapped with the custom wrapper you designed.

Here's mine. Green is my favorite color and I am indeed a chocolate lover.

It's obvious who this one belongs to!

Apparently, he wanted there to be no doubt about its ownership.

This is what the box looked like that the bar was packaged in.

It was a fun and memorable experience and is a must-do if you ever go to Hershey and you like chocolate. And I'm happy to report that these bars tasted even better than the everyday Hershey bars you can buy in the store, which was a very good thing after all the hard work we put into them! ;-)