Virtual Vacation: The Hershey Story

The actual "museum" part of the Hershey Story building was upstairs. Julie Crandall, if you're reading this, I have to tell you that I thought of you while we were in the museum. I remembered the conversation we had about all the kids' toys that "do something" - and how kids have lost the ability to be creative on their own. I regret to inform you that I was kind of bored with the plain old standard museum exhibits, and I was totally excited about the interactive stuff. WOOPS!

In addition to the standard memorabilia that one would expect to see in a museum, they also offered these very cool things:

You could design your own candy bar wrapper and then e-mail it to yourself! This was one of my better wrappers (I did five). My Christmas one was pathetic. When you print them out, they are actually large enough to cover a large Hershey bar - so you really can use them if you want!

Amber, being an art major, was much better at designing her wrappers. As I recall, though, this was one of the funnier ones.




Another cool interactive thing we did was the Hershey newspaper. You could select a headline, select a background, enter your name, and then pose for a picture (similar to the little photo booths in a mall) and then it would superimpose you into the picture and write your name into a story. You could email that to yourself too. Ours were hysterical. We decided to be in them together, but the name line wasn't long enough to handle both our names, so we had to become "Bek and Ber." In one of the pictures, we carefully picked out Mr. Hershey riding a camel in Egypt, but with both of us in the picture, we completely covered him up. So there was this whole caption about "Bek and Ber with Mr. Hershey" - but he was missing. We were tired and ridiculously goofy by that time, so we found it pretty funny.

Around the wall of one part of the museum was this timeline. The bottom (orange) part gave facts about world/national events, and the top part gave information about products introduced/changed/retired/whatever in Hershey world. This picture is from our birth years. I was born in the year of Rolos, Reese's Pieces, and Whatchamacalits.