A Pennsylvania town-turned-theme park celebrating all things Hershey. It is where Hershey chocolate candy is actually manufactured and born. It is also where all the streetlights are giant hershey kisses and every restaurant competes with the one next door for the most outlandish recipe bursting with chocolate bliss.
I remembered going there as a child for some reason and washing down melted chocolate sandwiches with chocolate milk served in a hard chocolate cup. It was every child's dream come true, similar in some respects to Homer's little fantasy about running around in a chocolate world and taking a bite out of a chocolate bunny as it hops by.
Anyway, my fiance and I were road tripping out east recently and happened to come across an exit for the fabulous Hershey Park somewhere outside of Philly. I had forgotten all about the existence of that place. Being the chocolate aficionados we are even in our mid-twenties, I was able to convince him to check it out.
Needless to say, as an older and slightly more mature traveller I was disappointed by the realization that it was not the candy wonderland I had remembered from my youth, but little more than a huge, plastic and dirty chunk of consumeristic Americana.
We still found time to stop at a diner for a chocolate sandwich before getting back on the road.