It’s been a while since we broke out of New England but we did so last week for a few VERY BUSY days! The following two weeks will likely all be blog entries from said trip so enjoy as I milk this adventure to death. Our destination was North Carolina but that’s a hell of a drive so we decided to stop halfway through to get a chocolate fix and maybe a few giggles.
For some reason I had no idea Hershey Park was a theme park. I thought it was some sort of boring educational park… with chocolate (which if I’m honest makes everything better.) I was a little shocked to see a closed theme park with enough parking lots to cover a small town. The gift shop was open, I was being told. OKAY…
The gift shop was indeed open and full of people with their small children. It was a little weird… who comes all this way for a gift shop? Even myself was more here looking for a bathroom. I’m a creature of simple needs, what can I say? After we found the rest rooms we wandered back into the shops, plural. One had mugs and bric-a-bracs, the other chocolate. So much chocolate. And we had come at the right time of year as there was Easter candy marked down as well as other goodies including Reeses peanut butter cups the size of a child’s head for $5. And if that wasn’t enough there was a long line for people making their own peanut butter cup with whatever fillings they wanted kind of like a sundae bar. Those were expensive though and the line was more than I wanted to deal with. Instead I grabbed a Nutrageous which my companion told me was the best and a package of caramel chocolates which I had no idea Hershey even made. I was also surprised to learn they also owned Twizzlers and Jolly Ranchers. It was fun finding weird flavors of all these things!
We did eventually find an educational display, wandered through it like it was the most fascinating thing on earth, and eventually ended up at a free ride! It was on moving ground… which… made for a very not graceful entrance on my part. Imagine a dog trying to stand in the car and that’s probably about as much balance I had as I plopped into the cart. We then got to ride through a fake factory and see the whole process of how chocolate was made, narrated by animatronic cows and various other critters. It was all very cutesy and I was a little embarrassed at points as it was making me dizzy. Christ, I can’t even handle toddler rides any more. This is getting ridiculous. Don’t age, it’s not fun! But by the end we were rewarded with a free bite size chocolate bar which I felt like I’d earned.
This was a fun little stop off with clean bathrooms! We got our fix of sweets and wandered out maybe half an hour later after peering through the gates to the closed theme park side of things. There’s few things as creepy as abandoned carnival rides without a soul in sight. I approve. Not sure how I’d feel about it if I were there during the season but eh. It was all good.
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