Day Nine: Amish Buggies and Chocolate Bars

In our final day of sightseeing (to be followed by a full day of driving) we were set to see Amish Country, and to tour Hershey Pennsylvania. In all candor, this was the day I was looking forward to the most. We woke up ON TIME, and hit the road. The drive to Lancaster County was not too bad - and I was glad not to have to do any serious walking. We made reservations for a buggy ride through an Amish area with Aaron & Jessica's Buggy Rides, which seemed to be in the heart of the community. Driving in we were surrounded mostly by farms.

I LOVED the signs - do you think they had similar signs when horse-drawn carriages were the primary mode of transportation?

As we drove in we caught a glimpse of some of the carriages. Luckily, we had been warned by the above pictured signage, so we were exercising caution. Ha.

Once we arrived at the store (from which the buggy rides departed) we were asked to sit on these benches and wait our turn (I will not talk about how an older couple cut in line - but they did). According to the website buggies were supposed to run every five minutes, but in practice they seemed to leave every 25 minutes. We ended up waiting just under an hour - but it was a nice day and we got to look at the horses.

I love this picture:

And this one as well:



And then it was our turn! Here are our horses.

The amount of food that is grown in this area is pretty impressive. This happens to be grapes.

There were also a lot of dairy farms. They said a huge percentage of the corn grown is used as feed for the cows.

I had been warned about this before we left, so I was not surprised, but about halfway through the ride we stopped and these too adorable children approached and tried to get us to buy cookies or pretzels. It was hard to say no because they were so damn cute. It did seem like an odd exploitation.

A few people bought things, but most people passed, and then we hit the road again.

Here we are in the buggy. The woman who took the picture seemed to be confused by the camera. I think she was looking for a dial to turn to advance the film... Also, yes, we are wearing stickers proclaiming that we did indeed ride a buggy.

I love this picture also.

At this point in the tour my camera battery was dying, so I snapped one picture from afar of the school. It is a two room school house for grades 1-8. The Amish do not believe that children should attend school after 8th grade.

Due to the dead battery, I have no more pictures of the tour, but I did learn a few interesting things. The tour guide was young and did not seem Amish at all. It turns out that when Amish kids turn 16 they are given the freedom to live a "normal" life, with no limitations on modern conveniences, until they decide whether they want to be Amish or not. They can take as much time as they want to decide, but once they make a decision they cannot take it back. If you decide to be Amish, and then you change your mind later, you are excommunicated. You can no longer do business with the Amish people, you cannot eat a meal with your family, etc. Our tour guide decided NOT to be Amish. He is in college studying to be a veterinarian.

The other thing that I did not know is that the Amish cannot have a land line because of the unnatural way it "connects people" - but they can use cell phones. They can also use "electricity" if it is powered by gas or coal or whatever, just not from power lines. I wonder if that follows the "spirit" of the rules. They cannot have cars, but if they have businesses they can buy cars under the company name and have the teenagers who are exempt from the rules (prior to deciding whether or not to be Amish) drive them. Crazy.

After the tour we bought handmade pretzels. They were so good. I have craved them every day since. I even went to Auntie Anne's to try to get over it - it did not work.

Next it was on to Hershey World! The drive was very pretty.

Here is the entrance!

So, I thought that were going to tour the actual Hershey Factory - turns out that is not possible. The "Factory Tour" is essentially a ride through a mock factory with large animatronic animals. More on that later.

The building itself was super cute.

The main thing that I wanted to do in Hershey was the tour of the city - so first up was buying our tokens for that.

Then we loaded into our cocoa-bean-shaped train car for our tour of the "Factory." It seemed that there was real chocolate being made, but I think it was just constantly recycled through the machines.

The tour began at the very beginning - with the dairy cows. They were singing dairy cows!

Next was the cocoa beans across the assembly line.

And the cocoa bean processor? (I may have made that name up)

Here we are in our cocoa-bean car.

The cows are back...

At this point it really began to smell like chocolate.

The production chart was cool. Supposedly it was tied to the real factory -but who knows.

The final stages:

As we were leaving that section of the tour we were stopped by a woman who worked for the Hershey marketing department who asked us to taste test for them! I taste tested dark chocolate covered raisins, and Bryan tested chocolate covered Starbucks coffee beans. They gave us crackers and water to clear our pallettes, and then we were given a survey and asked toanswer questions about the candy. It was very good!

The giant Hershey store was filled with giant Hershey candy, all of which was too expensive to buy, but not too expensive to play with!

Outside of the gift shop was the "Factory Works" exhibit, which was advertised as a an interactive experience during which you could "package your own Hershey Kisses!" There were two options:

1) A free tour (paper hat included)

2) A $10.00 tour, for which you were given the aforementioned hat, an ID with your name on it(!), and a certificate.

We opted to go the free route which ended up being a good choice. As it turned out, the term "exhibit" was very generous - it was a two-tiered conveyor belt. No kidding. You can see it in its entirety in this picture:

We started by putting on a paper hat and grabbing a gear shaped blue plastic container, pulling it open and placing it below a chute. We then stepped on a pedal, causing hershey kisses to drop into the container. Next we were asked to close the container and shake it - which was fine - except then we were directed to dance with it, and to spin around. No Kidding. I did not dance, nor did I spin. The big finale consisted of placing the blue container into a machine for "wrapping." It was advertised that you could purchase your Hershey Kisses after you had wrapped the container, but they had a very obvious box of pre-wrapped containers which they offered us for $10.00! In good news, I got a sweet (no pun intended) picture of a Kiss in motion.

The part of our time in Hershey that I enjoyed the most was a trolley tour through the town. The tour guide was very knowledgeable and he had a ton of corny jokes, which I thorougly appreciated. I really liked the trolley.

This Was Milton Hershey's boyhood home. We learned as we were taking this tour that Hershey, PA is not an official city or township. It is actually called Derry Church, PA.

And this is Founders Hall. It is on the campus of the Milton Hershey School. The story of the school is really interesting. You should read about it!

Milton Hershey built this mansion for his wife. When she died he moved out and never lived there again. It is now the Hershey Country Club.

It is interesting to see the 'Hershey' name on everything.

Even the amusement park is called "Hershey Park." The city is a little like "The Truman Show" in that Milton Hershey built it for his employees. He opened the plant and the built all of the things that his employees might need. He built housing, hotels, swimming pools, hospitals and schools. The amusement park was at one time (when there were far less rides) for emplyees only. I can't even get my employer to get me a new desk chair and they got an amusement park? There is a zoo attached to the park which is included with your park admission.

The rest of these pictures were taken after the trolley tour. I took a hundred or something - I loved the area. I think that it is all so cute.

Despite the family-friendly nature of my blog, I have to include this picture. I do not mean to make fun of this woman in any way, except that she was wearing NO underthings. And she bent over further than this pitcure shows. It was not at all pretty.

Here is Bryan as we were leaving.

At the recommendation of TripAdvisor, we decided to have dinner at Feniucci's, and on the way I took pictures of the famous Hershey Kiss street lamps. They line the entirety of Chocolate Avenue.

Fenicci's ended up being a very good restaurant. It used to be called DeAngelis Restaurant, and before that is was the H.B. Reese Candy Company.

The Hershey Kiss lights were even cuter in the dark.

The hotel we got outside of Hershey was very nice - I was worried about it because I had booked it at the last second through priceline. In the end it was one of the nicest we had stayed in. It was a Wyndham Gardens Hotel and it had some ammenities that others had not. Notably, a very comfortable chair with a laptop table and an ice "bucket" that looked like my Brita pitcher. I am easily impressed.

P.S. My pictures are formatted all crazily in this post. I cannot get them to fix. I have tried for two days. Blogger.