Crayola

I'm still caught up, unbelievable! :)

Last night Jacob and Alyssa went swimming in the hotel's pool and Mom thought that it would be neat to show you all a couple pictures of them with their newly acquired swimming skills.

Today we didn't get up early. We didn't have to be anywhere early so we enjoyed sleeping in just a little bit. Anyway, today we went to the Crayola factory. This was primarily for Alyssa. Just like with Hershey though, what we saw was not the actual factory. What they call the factory is really a place where they show you how Crayons are made (though they use old equipment so they only show you the basic idea, not exactly how it is done today) and they have a ton of activities for kids to do using Crayola products. Here is a picture of the outside of the building.

We had our picture taken with a crayon.

We then saw how the crayons were made which was actually kind of neat. After that we went through their activities. This meant working with construction paper, water colors, chalk, glow in the dark markers, presses, playdough like stuff, and melted crayon clay. Alyssa and Jacob were the only ones to do most of it. Mom helped Alyssa some, and did some on her own, though we all did their activity with water colors. This meant that we painted ties, yep, paper neck ties. They had the normal brushes and paints, but they also had water color pencils which work like colored pencils only with water paints. This was actually pretty fun and here are some pictures of all of us doing that.

There are three more pictures that I just have to share with you all. The second two are of Jacob in a motion projector thing. I'm not sure how it works, but essentially a light shines on a special wall and every move that he makes is projected onto a screen that changes the patterns of what he looks like.

Overall this was a very hands on, artsy place. Jacob, and espcially Alyssa, loved it and I think that the rest of us enjoyed it too.
We then went to the Crayola store. Like Hershey once again, you name a Crayola product and they've got it. They also have the world's largest crayon (not for sale of course). It weighs 1,500 pounds, and is 15 feet long (if I remember right). We then headed back to the hotel. Right now we are resting there. This may not have been a very eventful day, but we needed a day with some good down time. Especially since everyone aside from myself is borderline sick. It's just colds, and it isn't really affecting anyone except Alyssa, but please pray that we don't get sick.

Quote: "I can carry 1200 Crayons at once." Paraphrase from the guy who showed us how crayons are made. He was holding the mold that makes them.