Chocolate World in Hershey Pennsylvania, The Sweetest Place on Earth

 Hershey, PA really is a town built on the history that chocolatier Milton Hershey established when he chose the area to build his chocolate factory.


  There are little peeks of the town's chocolate history everywhere, it's the only city in the world with Hershey Kiss shaped street lights. They alternate between wrapped and unwrapped.


 They say you can even smell the chocolate in the air in there. I'm not sure that I did, maybe it was too hot, but I certainly saw chocolate everywhere I looked.


A couple of weeks before we arrived in Hershey, they opened a brand new section in Chocolate World called Create Your Own Candy Bar. It was pretty neat. We had to remove all jewelry and wear hair nets to enter. At one point, Ka'iulani had a beard net over her entire head, and it looked kinda cute like a bonnet because the beard nets had a strap that wrapped around. Problem was it couldn't accommodate her pig tails so she had to use a regular one. It was funny while it lasted.

Once inside we used computer screens to select the kind of ingredients we wanted in our candy bar. While we were there, the only option was using milk chocolate as the base, but the screen selections indicated that visitors will soon be able to choose between dark chocolate and white chocolate as well. Next we moved into an assembly line type of room where we were able to watch as our names popped up on a screen and our candy bars traveled the length of the room while the ingredients were added and the warm chocolate was poured onto the bars and finally sent to the dryer and packaging. Here's a short slide show of us as Hershey Factory Workers...




The finished products of our candy bars:
 It was very cool that we also got to design our own wrappers. At touch screen computers we looked at different designs, or opted to use our own names on the labels.


 The silver tins they came in are really nice too. It's worth making these candy bars just for the cute souvenirs.


 The girls all chose different ingredients for their bars. Ka'iulani chose graham crackers and caramel pieces, Kahiwa had the sprinkles topped with kissables, and Kamele wanted rice krispies, caramel pieces, and chocolate cookie bits all topped with kissables (basically she threw in the maximium number of ingredients the computer would let her select.) The candy bars were great too~ mine was rice krispies and chocolate cookie bits and it was sooo good. Alyssa is the only one who hasn't touched hers yet, I'm not sure what she's waiting for, she's just a saver.


 Mine is the one with the cow, and Dave's is the lime colored one. I was surprised that we both chose the old fashioned Hershey's logo as opposed to using our names. Keeping in mind the number of different template options we had, I'm sure I could ask Dave to calculate the probability that we would choose the same one, but I won't :-)