Hershey and Amish

Make sure that you read the post beneath this one first if you want to stay in chronological order.

Yesterday we travelled from Gettysburg to Allentown. This meant that we made a couple stops on the way. Our first stop was in Hershey. We went to the Hershey plant. Though it's not the actual factory, it's just a place where they show you through a ride how the chocolate is made. It is basically a Disney style ride where you travel in a little car seeing all the different steps of chocolate making.

Here is a picture of the outside entrance. The whole thing is mostly an advertisement, but it was actually okay, and Alyssa needed something that she could enjoy.

This is the only picture that came out very well from inside the ride. These are the three cows who sang about their milk making Hershey's milk chocolate. Corny, yes, but not quite as bad as I thought it would be.

After the ride was a huge Hershey store. They had every Hershey product you can think of. They had coffee cups, shirts, 5 pound Hershey bars, and entire walls of candy bars. It was a little overwhelming, but in some ways it was neat. Here is a sign that we saw that we all really liked.

It was fun being at the Hershey factory, even if it was corny.
We headed to a pretzel factory next. It was a small bakery that was the first commercial pretzel factory in America. They also were the first to commercially make hard pretzels. It started in 1861 if I remember correctly. It was pretty neat, they showed us how to make pretzels, and they showed us the ovens. Here is a picture of the ovens.

When they used these ovens they would heat them to 500 degrees. I can't imagine working in that heat.
Now I understand the how symbolic pretzels are too. I think that most everyone knows how pretzels began as something that priests made to give to children who had learned their prayers. They symbolize a child in prayer, plus the three holes symbolize the Trinity. Even the process of making the pretzels is symbolic in some way in each stage.

We also went through the countryside. The trouble is that we got a little lost trying to find the buffet that we were headed to for lunch. It is called the Shady Maple. When we finally got there the buffet was amazing. The buffet was 200 feet long with just about everything you could ask for. Most of us stuffed ourselves to the breaking point since it's all you can eat. The food was really good and we enjoyed our lunch, but decided that we didn't need to eat dinner since it was a late and massive lunch.
We then went to the Shady Maple grocery store where we picked up some healthy food for lunches and stuff. Before that though we saw an Amish buggy. Jacob had done a report on the Amish so he really, really wanted to see it. Here is a picture of the buggy.

We then finally made it to the hotel. It was a long day, but we really enjoyed it.

Quote: The GPS said, "Turn around when possible." Mom said, "Shut up!" A glimpse of us being lost. :)