Hershey, PA

Jessica and Alexis's visit to Reading gave us a chance to go to Hershey, PA, which is advertised as "The Sweetest Place on Earth." After selling his successful Lancaster Caramel Company in 1900 for $1 million, Milton S. Hershey turned his focus to the production of milk chocolate, which was a Swiss luxury product at the time. To do so he returned to his hometown of Derry Church, PA where he would be able to obtain large quantities of fresh milk and started a factory. Along with the factory, he also worked hard to establish a factory town for his employees that would provide them with a sense of community.

Formerly a location of the Milton S. Hershey School, the Hotel Hershey currently overlooks the factory and amusement park area.

This is the entrance to Chocolate World, where we spent most of our time.

Some of these people really like Reese's Peanut Butter Cups (Reese originally worked for Hershey before leaving to start his own company that used Hershey chocolate. After his death, his company was sold to Hershey.)

After spending some time in Chocolate world and going on the tour where we saw the singing cows, we took a "trolley" ride around town where we learned some of the history behind the factory, the city, and the school.

They did a good job of making the inside of the bus look like an actual trolley.

Alexis and Jessica on the trolley.

Brent and Billie on the trolley.

This is a building downtown. Note the design of the street lights.

This home was built by Milton S. Hershey's great grandparents and is where he was born on September 13, 1857. After being sold and repurchased by Hershey, this was the first location of the Hershey school.

After our trolley tour we returned to Chocolate world to make some candy. Unfortunately, facial hair had to be covered up, too.

Jessica and Alexis after preparing to make candy.

Everybody picked a base (dark chocolate, milk chocolate, or white chocolate) that moved along this conveyor belt. As it went, the fillings that you had selected were dumped in.

After the fillings had been added it was coated with milk chocolate.

Billie, Jessica, and Alexis look for their candy bars in the cooling tunnel. Watching chocolate cool was not as exciting as they make it appear.

While things were cooling everybody got to design their packaging. Here, Jessica oversees Alexis's design.

After cooling, the candy bars were boxed and then put into tins with our designs on the outside.

Possibly the highlight of the day for some of these people - a real, live Reese's Peanut Butter Cup! (You'll remember that they were excited to get their pictures taken next to a picture of one earlier in the day.)

After leaving Chocolate World, we went to the botanical gardens, which were free because spring had not quite sprung.

This is the view of the amusement park and factory from the gardens.

Alexis with some Hershey Kiss fountains. She's probably glad that they weren't spraying water.

A butterfly with some flowers starting to grow on its wings.

We had a good time in Hershey but the various tours, chocolate tastings, and candy makings could be expensive. Regarding the Hershey School, it started as a school for orphaned boys but is currently coeducational and enrolls about 1800 students from low-income families all over the country. Starting in 1905 Hershey created a trust to provide the town's financial services and manage the funds for his philanthropic efforts. The $60 million in Hershey company stock that he gave to the school in addition to 486 acres of land is currently worth more than $7 billion.

Jessica and Alexis Visit Reading

Although we moved from Indiana to Pennsylvania, as Emily and Kerri and Shannon have demonstrated, the increased distance from friends and family hasn't entirely stopped us from having visitors. Our proximity to Philadelphia and other historic sites also means that there might be more to do when people come to Reading. At the end of March, my sister Jessica took advantage of her daughter Alexis's spring break and came for a visit. Billie and I were working while they were here but we still managed to fit in some activities (and some games like Boggle and Clue).

Today we'll look at some pictures of their visits to Reading landmarks before taking a look at our trip to Hershey on Tuesday.

Our first stop was the Pagoda on Mt. Penn. Alexis was disappointed that Mt. Penn did not have snow on top of it and rejected its status as a mountain.

Here is a closer view of Jessica and Alexis with the Pagoda sign. Alexis did not reject the labeling of the Pagoda.

Jessica and Alexis on the walkway around the Pagoda with the city of Reading behind them.

After the Pagoda we moved on to the Albright campus, where Jessica was the first to pose as Jacob Albright (as Kerri and Shannon would later get to experience).

At Christmas, Jessica had boldly claimed that she could tell the difference between Pepsi from different containers. We took the opportunity to test her claims when she visited.

The result was total failure on Jessica's part. She did not match a single sample to its container. The correct answers were: 1=can, 2=2 liter, and 3=20 oz, but Jessica guessed 1=20 oz, 2=can, and 3=2 liter.

Unfortunately, we don't have any pictures of playing Boggle or Clue or watching Tangled, but we do have some pictures of our trip to Hershey that you can see in a few days.

Yard Work

When we bought our house last year we knew that we wanted to declutter the yard but by the time we were done getting the inside ready to live in it was too hot outside to do much work. This year we decided that we would get some outside work done, so in early April we had a dying tree cut down, removed quite a few shrubs and moved a few others. Then, since we like to do things as close as possible to when people will be visiting us, we had mulch delivered a few days before Kerri and Shannon were going to arrive and I spent a day distributing it around the house while Billie was at work. Below are some before and after photos of our yard work:

Note the large shrubs in front of the entryway and the dead/dying tree just to the left of the house.

Although the fact that leaves had grown in makes it harder to see, note that you can actually see the porch in this picture.

This view shows the tree next to the house that we had cut down as well as some of the shrubs in front of the house.

Here they have been replaced by grass and mulch.

This was apparently a "butterfly bush" that was long-past the point of trimming. There was another on the right side of the house.

The bush is gone (as is the one on the side of the house) and is replaced by grass. I don't miss it.

Here is another view of the front of the house showing how big the front shrubs were.

And here is the way it looks now. Note that we planted grass in front of the sidewalk since we have more than enough space to plant flowers between the sidewalk and the house.

This view doesn't have a "before" picture to go with it, but it demonstrates the new grass pattern and open space in front of the house.

Finally, we have a picture of the mulch around the bushes in the back of the house. Other than pulling weeds out we didn't change anything back here.

Now that things are cleaned up, maybe we'll get around to planting some flowers next year!

Visiting Philadelphia

Since we only live an hour or so from Philadelphia, Billie and I have been there before. Kerri and Shannon's visit, though, gave us a chance to do some things we hadn't done before while they got to see things for the first time.

One thing that we've never gotten to do was go into Independence Hall. Unfortunately, that didn't change on this trip. The tickets are free but there are a limited number available. Arriving in the late morning on a holiday weekend meant that they were gone by the time we got there. Maybe next time somebody visits us we can go inside!

One place we did get to go was to see the liberty bell. Unfortunately, Shannon and Kerri appear to have broken it.

Oh, this sign explains that it wasn't broken by Shannon and Kerri - the bell apparently cracked because of shoddy materials and workmanship in the 1700s and 1800s.

After seeing the liberty bell we stopped for lunch at the City Tavern, where we ate a meal that Ben Franklin would have approved of.

We also took a walk along the river front and stopped for a while to watch the events preceding an Indian wedding (not pictured). After we realized that these events would take forever, we continued on our way.

Here is a closer view of the Ben Franklin Bridge (painted Ben Franklin Blue) that connects Pennsylvania to New Jersey over the Delaware River. I say George Washington should have just taken the bridge since the boat he reportedly took instead look awfully cramped.

One thing Billie and I have never done (in any city) was take a Duck Boat tour, which drive around the city and then go into the water. These tours were shut down for a while in Philadelphia after a boat hit one and two people died (Kerri said that they were "just missing"). Read on to see if we survived our tour...

Shannon and Kerri are seen here surviving the tour.

We survived, too, though the girl behind us photobombing our picture may not have.

In order to preserve the value of some of the historic neighborhoods they drove us through, they didn't give us these duck quackers until the tour was over. I can't imagine that anybody I was with would have abused them, though...

Monday morning it was time for Kerri and Shannon to leave. Unfortunately for her, Shannon's flight left before Kerri's, so Kerri got to play putt putt with us and eat at Five Guys before she headed back to Kentucky.

Now that Kerri and Shannon have visited us (even if the visit was delayed a year by Kerri's time in Japan), I suppose that it is our turn to visit Kentucky or Michigan.

Intercourse, PA

There are a lot of small towns (though calling them "towns" is probably being generous) in Pennsylvania with strange names, many of them in Amish or Pennsylvania Dutch (a.k.a. German) areas. Among these are Bird-in-Hand, Blue Ball, Virginville, and Intercourse, which was our destination with Kerri and Shannon on the Saturday afternoon of Memorial weekend. Intercourse is south of Reading in Lancaster County. Because it was already mid-afternoon when we got there, we spent most of our time in the Kitchen Kettle Village shopping area.

Here we are in front of the Kitchen Kettle Village wagon.

Not far from the wagon, Kerri had a run in with this donkey, which she claims tried to bite her three times (the donkey might ask her why she is holding her hand out like it is food).

Fortunately, Kerri was able to find an animal that liked her better.

Shannon was also able to gain some authentic cow-milking experience.

Behind the shops was a seating area with a view of the fields. It is too bad there were a bunch of people on the benches blocking the view.

Most of the shops closed around five so we had to leave before Kerri and Shannon got a chance to offer their newly-gained farming experience to this person who was plowing a nearby field.

This post concludes our Saturday adventures. On Friday we'll cover our Sunday trip to Philadelphia.

Around Reading: The Daniel Boone Homestead

As noted yesterday, our first stop with Kerri and Shannon on the Saturday morning of Memorial weekend was the Daniel Boone Homestead. Although it is only about five miles from our house and we've driven past it numerous times, Billie and I had never been there. Daniel Boone was born and grew up on this land from 1734 until 1750, when he moved to North Carolina and eventually Kentucky (Kerri actually lives in Boone County, KY!). Our guide told us that young Daniel would go out into the woods for weeks at a time to hunt, which is quite a bit different from the activities of kids today. Here are some pictures from our visit:

The right end of this house is where Daniel Boone was born and lived. The rest was added by later owners.

Here we are standing outside of the house. The door behind us is directly opposite the door on the front porch. Both doors lead into the kitchen. To our left is the entrance to the cellar under the newer section of the house. Also with us is our guide, who volunteered here for years before being hired. He was incredibly patient with the thousands of questions Shannon asked.

Under the original house is a spring cellar, which has slowly flowing water from an underground spring all year around. This served as a natural refrigerator during Daniel Boone's time and is still used today when reenactments take place on the property.

This is the main living room of the house. The furniture that wasn't being used was pushed up against the walls until it was needed.

This is the hearth in the kitchen where cooking was done. Hopefully the doors on both ends of the room provided a breeze when cooking during the summer!

There was also a dining room and bedroom on the main floor. In this picture Billie and Shannon are climbing the stairs to the second floor. They straighten out after going around this tight curve but I wonder how many people injured themselves on stairs like these.

This is the view from the back of the house.

These are some other buildings that were on the property. Kerri and Shannon tried unsuccessfully to break into the house on the left.

Having visited the Daniel Boone Homestead, we headed off to the Pagoda and Albright, which we showed you yesterday. Our day didn't end there, though. On Wednesday, we'll have some pictures from our afternoon in Intercourse, PA.

Memorial Weekend: Kerri and Shannon in Reading

Kerri and Shannon, two of my friends from CMU, came for a visit over Memorial Weekend (Kerri, by the way, posted about their visit on May 31st - the day they left). After some delayed flights Friday night the rest of the visit went smoothly. In addition to the typical tour of Reading and Albright, their visit gave us an excuse to do some other things in the area that we hadn't gotten around to yet. We'll post about the other things later but, for now, here are some pictures from their tour of Reading:

Shannon, Kerri, and Billie in front of the pagoda.

Kerri and Shannon with Reading behind them.

Shannon, a lion, and Brent on the Albright campus.

Shannon posing as Jacob Albright (Jessica was the first to do this but since she visited at the end of March and I'm posting about things in reverse chronological order it will be a while before we get to her visit).

Kerri stepped into Jacob Albright's shoes as well.

Albright was actually our second stop on Saturday. Tomorrow we'll have more about our first stop at the Daniel Boone Homestead.

A New Record

Unfortunately, this record isn't for anything exciting. According to the Reading Eagle, yesterday was the hottest day ever officially recorded in Berks County. The temperature of 106 topped the previous high of 105 set on August 7, 1918. The article doesn't talk about it but a report on Weather.com said that the lows in many places are also setting records. Last night's low was about 80. Today the high is supposed to be 99 with an overnight low of 76. We also haven't had more than a few sprinkles of rain in weeks - possibly over a month. At this point I would settle for a week of rain and temperatures in the 70s.