Virtual Vacation: Chocolate Lab

I promised Christina some chocolate, so here goes!

After we spent the morning at the Botanical Gardens (those posts are below), we ate lunch and got majorly lost trying to navigate the town.

We found the Hershey Story museum, which offered a variety of fun things. There are two more posts below about this stop on the trip.

The first thing we did was participate in the Chocolate Lab. Not a dog. An actual lab with actual chocolate.

The first part was kind of like school. We listened to a lady talk to us about the history of cacao and the origin of chocolate. Here I am with a cacao pod. (I think. I was actually far more caught up in the pictures than the listening. Such a bad student.)

After that, we learned about the "nibs" which are inside the pod, and we took turns grinding them with this little granite pestle thing. At this point, I began thanking God for candy bars. This was all a lot of effort for, as the instructor said, "a mediocre chocolate drink." At least she was honest!

Please know how much pride I have swallowed to post the hairnet pictures. NOT my best look. The lady in the background was kind of a Where's Waldo-ette of our trip. We saw her at the gardens...we saw her here...and she was even staying in our hotel! She was nice, but it was funny to keep seeing her everywhere. In this picture I'm grating a piece of chocolate. And part of my glove. But don't tell.

We put the grated chocolate in warm water and did this whisking thing until it dissolved. Then we could add honey, cinnamon, corn meal (!?!) and red pepper flakes (!??!?!??!?) if we wanted to alter the taste and consistency of our drink.

No words. What a dumb picture. LOL.

Amber's empty cup, and her "parting gift" - a chocolate cacao pod.

I'm glad we did the lab - it was not a long activity, but it was fun and different. And I managed to learn just a thing or two...like I look horrible in a hairnet...and chocolate has come a LONG way.

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.

Virtual Vacation: Chocolate Tasting

At this point, we'd not really indulged in chocolate, and it felt wrong. After all, we'd been in Hershey almost 24 hours! Cafe Zooka, which was part of the Hershey Museum complex, offered a chocolate tasting experience (for a nominal fee, of course). All we knew is that we'd be drinking warm chocolate.


Here was the setup of the tasting. We received little glasses filled with chocolate from different places, each with a different percentage of pure cacao. The little boxes gave us information about the location...and also told us the percentage of cacao.

Interesting thing about this - it wasn't like drinking hot chocolate, as I thought it would be. This was thick - like drinking a melted chocolate bar. Amber called it chocolate sludge, and that was a really good description. I had to drink water after every sip. And some of the bitter ones, I couldn't even finish.

Amber with her chocolate sludge.

This ended up serving as our dinner. LOL. After the gardens and before we got lost, we had an enormous lunch at Red Robin. Neither of us were particularly hungry, so we just let this be our dinner - and then we ate some snacks in the hotel later.

Virtual Vacation: Hershey Sights

We left the museum right before it closed for the day, and according to what we'd read in brochures and online, most other things would be closing up shop too, so we decided to call it a day and head back to the hotel. Before we went, though, we snapped a few pictures of the streets of Hershey.

This is the Hershey museum, which is apparently a fairly new or updated version. We nearly never found it, but once we did, we weren't sure how we missed it. Must be the same way we got lost in Indiana. LOL.
Took this picture waiting for a green light. This is just a sign in front of the museum.

Cafe Zooka - where we enjoyed the chocolate tasting. :)

We didn't hit the theme park (I'm not good with rapidly moving rides) but we did see this ride that looked fun. The ring rotated around as it went (slowly) up and down. I think it would have been a fun way to see over Hershey!

And it's true - they really do have kiss shaped street lights. I'd heard you were also supposed to be able to smell chocolate in the streets - but I didn't. I'm not sure if I missed it or if it's not there anymore. I did smell it in the lobby of our hotel, though. Nice touch!

So there's our brief tour-o-town!

Virtual Vacation: Botanical Gardens

There are four posts below (I would apologize, but it's my blog and I'm really not sorry) that cover our trip to Hershey Gardens. I saw this listed in a Triple A book and thought it looked like a fun place to go. I'd never before been to a botanical garden, so I was absolutely fascinated. I don't know how this one stacks up to other gardens around the country, but I have to say I was impressed with the variety and the beauty of the place!

Just to give you an idea...the site says the gardens cover 23 acres, and here are the types of areas they offered: a rose garden, an Italian rose garden, the children's garden, the butterfly house, the oak grove, a Japanese garden, ornamental grasses, an arboretum, a conifer collection, another rose garden, an herb garden, a perennial garden, a memorial garden, the square and fan gardens, and a garden dedicated to a former director of the Hershey Gardens.

We spent over two hours in the Gardens and loved every minute of it.

Here is one of the best "overall" views we got - and this still probably only covered an itty bitty part of it. We didn't have the greatest weather day, but it didn't matter.

I am going to make a sign like this...

...for when my yard looks like this. :)

Amber took this picture and it just cracked me up. No, this bird was not responsible for the mess under it, but it sure looks like it, doesn't it? :) I think in my scrapbook, I'll caption this, "Some days are just like this."

They had many weeping trees (you'll see a whole post on one of them below) but this was one of the more unusual ones.

If you've read my blog for very long, you know I l-o-v-e roses. To be in a garden with three whole areas designated for roses...well, I was in heaven.

Hey Skyepuppy - are you proud(ish) of this one? I remembered to do an angle shot with my camera. This was back in the tree part of the garden, and it was absolutely tranquil back there. I loved it...could have stayed for hours more!

I was pretty proud of this picture, too. There were a number of ponds and fountains around the garden.

I'm normally not a big fan of sculpture, but this one was good. I think I liked the incorporation of color. I don't recall seeing color on a sculpture like this before.

The only kind of bluegrass I can stand. :)

Amber..."attacked" by one of the weeping trees.

We took this picture for Amber's mom, who loves yellow roses.

The only two disappointing things were the lack of activity in the butterfly garden (more on that in a post below) and the non-existence of Swan Lake. This is the lake, which the sign says they drain a few times a year for cleaning and such. This was one of those times. We took a picture anyway...just imagine your own swans, I guess. In the background, up on the hill, was a hotel where we did NOT stay. It was one of the uber-expensive ones.

Below are more posts about specific parts of the garden. I promise promise promise the next posting session will be about chocolate!!

Virtual Vacation: Botanical Garden Children's Garden

There were many different areas to the gardens, and one of the fun areas was the Children's Garden. About the time we made our way toward it, a massive field trip showed up, so we had to keep dodging kids. But then again, I guess we were invading their area. LOL.

The Children's Garden was a little bit different from the main part - because there were more teaching tools incorporated. There were also several themes that were fun and different.

Here's Amber at the entrance to that part of the Garden.

These kisses shot out some water mist at various intervals. We thought we could get it in action, but it never worked. I think, however, we amused one of the workers in the process. We didn't see her sitting over to the side reading a book. (She was watching the entrance to the butterfly house...not loafing on the job.)

The walkway had these Hershey bar bricks to teach fractions. I took a picture of the whole bar because I see no point in a half used candy bar. But there were some that had "pieces" out and you could figure out how many twelfths were missing. Now maybe if they'd taught math to me that way in school, I'd like it better!!!

One of the sections had a plant for every letter of the alphabet. Amber posed with the "A" plant...

And of course, I posed with "R."

I should have taken more pictures of this part, but I didn't. They had a "spa" section where they grew plants used in spa products. The plants grew in a claw foot tub, and they made a "window" beside it with a "curtain" of climbing trellis plants. Super cute. At the end of the tub were these rock slippers that you could try on.

We have a picture of Amber demonstrating this, but she hated the picture, so I didn't post it. We couldn't really do this because it was such a cloudy day, but they had a human sundial. You stood on the brick according to the month and held your arm up in the air...and the shadow was supposed to fall across the appropriate hour.

This was just outside the exit to the butterfly garden. This was a "love garden." Why they had that in the children's part, I don't know. But the pond is a heart shape, and the little stools are upside down kisses. Cute, huh?

Amber took this and I really liked it. You can't tell this very well, but the path leading from the camera to the kisses is a butterfly body, and the flowers on either side are in the shape of wings. The butterfly garden is just to the right. We took some pictures in there, but I'm not posting them because they weren't very good. We were told since it was so cold and rainy, the butterflies were not active. That was so true. We only saw a couple.

The children's garden had other things in it - and there was also an "amphitheater" in it, with very brightly colored seats. The group there hadn't gotten to the part of using it yet, but it was roped off for them. I thought it made a great field trip location!

Virtual Vacation: Botanical Garden Weeping Tree

Amber and I loved this enormous weeping tree. I forget the exact name of it - and the name plate in the pictures is too small to read. I had to back up pretty far to get the whole tree in the frame of my camera.

There were little arbors at the "entrance" to the tree. If I wrote fiction, this would have been a perfect spot to find a story idea...entering the secret tree.

Amber under the tree. You can see where it had rained and the top part of the tree trunk was still wet.

As you can see, the branches were very curvy. Made for some fun shots!

You can kind of see, to the left here, how people have carved on the tree over the years. There was a sign posted by the trunk asking people to please stop carving on the tree.

Virtual Vacation: Botanical Garden Close-Ups

And now, for the close-up pictures.

Amber was an art major in college, so she's really good with pictures. You'll be able to tell right away which ones were hers. It had rained in the night, and since we visited first thing in the morning (and by that, I mean 11:00ish), all the plants were still covered in raindrops. They were beautiful.

Amber taught me to use the macro setting (as if I even know what that means) on my camera to get some close-ups.

Skyepuppy, I needed your tutorial in front of me....you would have found better shots!

Here was some of the ornamental grass:

Raindrops on roses....

This was one of my first attempts. I'd actually taken a picture of this before she taught me about the setting, and I went back and redid it. I should have kept the first one to show the difference. But...I was trying to conserve memory card space.

Amber...taking pictures of me with my newfound skill. The rest of the pictures on down are her creations. Enjoy them!

Better raindrops on a prettier rose:

LOVE this one.

And this one:

Some of my other close ups were on the teaser post from earlier this week. Hope you enjoyed the close-ups! If I ever go back to Hershey, this would definitely be on my must-see list again. I know it has nothing to do with chocolate, but it was beautiful. And I'd kind of like to see it on a sunny day, too!