Well, 4:40 a.m. came as quickly as expected. What I didn't expect was to see my daughter awake in her room. She'd fallen asleep really early last night-for her-and she woke up basically in the middle of the night wide awake. Whoops. So I got her some breakfast, and she took a shower, and she had a leg up on the day. I bet she's tired tonight, though!
I had perfectly lovely weather all the way to Pennsylvania. I was headed East, so I got to watch the sun rise in front of me, and I was at 19,000' which put me above the little bit of rain and ice that was out there. I also had 40 knot tailwinds pushing me along, and a quietly working passenger in the back seat. The trip was a 10 hour or more drive for him, and a 2.3 hour flight. You gotta love airplanes.
My first stop was breakfast. I hadn't eaten anything since lunch the day before, so I was hungry. I found a little place called "The Tomato Pie Cafe" in Litiz, PA, just the kind of place I look for. Excellent reviews, different than what I can get elsewhere, etc. It was different, all right. Tomato pie is something they actually serve, along with food that has beets and goat cheese and stuff in it. I took a photo of their menu to prove it. I like to try new foods, but some of that was just...wow...so I went with a tasty sounding maple and spices french toast with cinnamon butter and real maple syrup, and a lavender white chocolate mocha. And there was actual lavender in it. Like a couple of flecks of the actual plant were in it. And yet somehow it was still good. Really weird, but good.
When we landed in Lancaster, my passenger had handed me a well-organized packet that had my hotel info, my car rental info, driving directions to the hotel, and tickets to, information about, and driving directions to Hershey's Chocolate World. It was all set up. I had a 'chocolate tasting' set for 11 a.m., then a "Create your own chocolate bar" experience at noon, then a trolley ride through the city with a conductor who gave us a history of stuff at 1:45. In the meantime you could go on a tour of how they make the chocolate, and the shops in there. Oh man, the shops. I would say I was like a kid in a candy store, but, well, I wasn't LIKE a kid in a candy store, I WAS a kid in a candy store. A really BIG candy store. I don't see how parents can take kids in there. I mean, holy cow. You think it's bad getting past the candy checkout aisle at a grocery store? Try taking a kid past mountains and walls of every junk food in giant cool sizes, add stuffed animals and trinkets and t-shirts and more trinkets that light up, make noise, or are cute. They have 2 lb. Hershey Kisses, giant stuffed kisses characters, giant Reece's Peanut Butter Cups, etc. Then add in the food places that display these specialty decadent chocolate concoctions. And the whole place smells like warm chocolate at all times. It's evil. Kaylee must never see this place.
The tasting provided a bottle of water for palate cleansing, six different types of chocolates, a lesson on how to taste test chocolate (NO CHEWING ALLOWED IN MY CLASS! Let it MELT on your tongue!), and a sheet that told you the different 'notes' of flavor you would likely taste in each sample of chocolate. I did learn a few things about how the flavors come about (it's all natural, based on what the cocoa is growing next to), and I actually could taste the buttery or woodsy or fruity "notes" most of the time. Kind of neat. The create your own bar was something too. They let you use their machinery, but you have to wear a hair net, covering every bit of hair and earrings, and if you have a beard you have to wear a beard net too. My beard wasn't quite thick enough to require that, at least. ;) Then you have to wear a plastic apron over your clothing, and you have to wear latex gloves over your hands if you are wearing rings or nail polish. I saw myself in the mirror, and scared myself. I looked like an angry and very unattractive lunch lady. I must never take a job where a hair net is required, mental note made. :O My bar was hollowed out milk chocolate and I added butterscotch and toffee chips to the center of it, after which it was coated in chocolate over the whole thing. You then created your own wrapper to put over this giant thing, and a laser printed your name on it and made up your wrapper exactly like you design it on the kiosk. Pretty wild. The tour of "how we make chocolate" is good because you can sit the whole time, and you go around these machines and such on a ride. But the trolley was the surprise for the day. I only did that because they bought it for me, but normally I'd skip a trolley ride around town with a history lesson. I'm glad I didn't. That was really interesting, and the story of what Mr. and Mrs. Hershey have done in that town is A.Mazing. It would take 45 minutes of talking to tell the whole story--I know this, because it did. ;) But a couple of quick highlights. He had a 5th grade education only, and his lawyer was a close friend who never went to law school. He just read the book and passed the bar, and the legal stuff he set up over 100 years ago has held up this whole time against law suits and other such things. Milton Hershey failed 6 times in candy businesses, went bankrupt over and over, in several cities across the country, borrowed from everyone he knew, had everyone mad at him...and when he made it, he convinced his aunt, his only remaining relative who would talk to him or that he hadn't borrowed from already, to mortgage her house for one more go, he made it huge, and he took care of his whole community, in every way. I can't begin to tell you how, but it's really impressive. He gave them all homes at building cost only, interest free loans, owned all the local utilities, just on and on. To this day the (Massive) school he set up for orphans is run off of his foundation, worth something like $8 billion, and they operate everything off of the interest and profits from their chocolates, never have touched the principle, and do not take a dime of government money for anything, ever. Every kid (2500 I think) that goes there to this 10,000 acre facility goes for free, from across the country. They can come as early as 4 years old, are placed in a home to live in, with a married couple to act as parents, with 8-12 kids per home, a van, all their clothes, medical needs, schooling, entertainment, a savings account, and taught a trade, for free to them. When they graduate they get $100 bill, their savings account, a new suitcase, a new suit (or dress), a new laptop, and if they kept their grades up, their behavior good, and their effort was good, they get an automatic $80,000 scholarship towards college. All covered by this endowment. To get into this school, you have to come from a family that can't support you, (the max family income of any kid there was $14,000/year), or be an orphan, have no criminal history, no juvie record, and go through an interview. No special grades, no special smarts, just by need only. I don't think we can support Kaylee any more... Anyway. The school offers free psychological support to them and their entire families, if they have one. They must attend church every Sunday morning, boys in suit and tie, girls in dresses or pant suits in winter, or be in the hospital, their choice. The school asks alumni to give back to their own communities, and there's a wall of them who have done just that, in some huge ways. This doesn't touch the surface of what M. Hershey did with his employees, how their county had a ZERO unemployment rate during the Great Depression, etc. Just...really impressive.
After I left Hershey, I came back to check into the hotel, and got sleepy, so I think I'll skip dinner tonight (I have way too many samples of chocolate in the room anyway--they kept handing them out in there, from full sized bars to kisses to the bar I made, etc.) I did reconnect on Facebook with a grade school friend of mine, which is weird. She saw I posted about being in Hershey, only to find out her house is 5 miles from my hotel here. So I'm going to meet up with her tomorrow before I head home. She has an identical twin sister, and they lived on a farm with two brothers, and we used to go out there when I was a kid, and I'd go play with them and get lost in the mud and the pond and climb trees and wreak all sorts of havoc back there. The three of us were going to open a Detective Agency when we grew up. Guess that didn't happen, but we thought we were mighty mystery crime solvers back then. :) My family moved away from there when I was 13 or 14, and I never saw them in person again. But Facebook hooked us back up several years ago, so tomorrow I'll meet up with one of the sisters (the other lives far away), and it'll be neat to catch up on life since 27 years ago. Geez. :O
I'm just going to try not to fall asleep too early tonight and pull a Kaylee, myself! I do think it's kind of funny that I'm in room 333 here...which I just learned on my last trip to Mississippi with Kevin is the magic number...when you hit 333 knots, you're at 400 mph. So there ya go. :)
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