Our First Field Trip of the Year

Updated for you on September 6, 2013

We decided to take our first field trip of the 2013-2014 school year this past weekend.  It wasn’t a long field trip, but it was a fun and informative one.  We headed over the Hershey, PA for a day trip to visit Chocolate World at Hershey Park.  There are lots of things to do at Chocolate World, so we only scratched the surface on Sunday.

We started off by riding Hershey’s Great American Chocolate Tour Ride.  It’s a cute ride that reminded us of Spaceship Earth at Epcot, only this ride tells about the making of chocolate.  Leading up to the ride, there are monitors that tell the story of the cocoa bean from the tropical rainforest.  The ride itself focuses on how the cocoa bean is made into chocolate, and the cows love to help tell that story because of how important they think their milk is to Hershey’s chocolate.  We loved smelling the aroma of chocolate during the ride, and we even got a small Hershey chocolate bar afterwards.

Next, we took the Hershey Trolley Works on a tour of Hershey, PA.  This was an air conditioned ride throughout important places in Hershey.  There were several things that I learned during this tour, but the most important are as follows:

• I didn’t realize that Mr. Hershey had so many failures before his success with milk chocolate.  I guess this really shows how important it is to keep trying if you don’t succeed the first time.
• I didn’t realize just how much the Hershey’s gave back to not only the community but to people in general.  The story of the Milton Hershey School was mind boggling.  It is amazing that they were able to build a residential school for those in need AND put $100 in the pocket of every graduate.  The guide said that now, graduates also have the opportunity to get a sizable scholarship, too.

Lastly, we did the Hershey’s Create Your Own Chocolate Bar Attraction.  This is one of those once-in-a-lifetime things on my daughter’s bucket list.  It was fun to do, but I’m not sure that we would do it again due to its price.  It was educational and fun to see how the ingredients were added to the bar and to watch the chocolate come down as a curtain over the ingredient that we chose.  We now have chocolate bars that will take weeks to eat but will provide years of memories.

We want to go back in the future to do other things and to go to The Hershey Story museum.  But for now, we have learned a little bit of Pennsylvania history and eagerly look forward to our next field trip.