Our Summer Vacation - day 1

This year for our summer vacation, we took a road trip. The kids were so excited. Notice in the photo that they can hardly take their eyes of the TV screen in the car for the photo.


We left CT on Friday, June 23 (the first day the kids were out of school for the summer). Driving here in the Northeast is so different than driving in TX. In the northeast, after 30 minutes you enter New York and then 45 minutes later New Jersey and then 1 hour later - Pennsylvania. Driving from Houston the same amount of time you would not have even made it to San Antonio yet -- not to mention the 12 more hours after that you would need to drive to even get to New Mexico.


We drove to Hershey's Chocolate World and did the free tour. I thought it would be a tour of their actual factory, but it is a "ride" tour of a pretend factory. You still get the idea for how chocolate is made, but it is not the same as a real factory. The place was packed. There are lots of other things to do at chocolate world, but the rest all cost a pretty penny.















Our time at Chocolate world was mostly to pass the time until 7:30 p.m. because at Hershey Park if you have tickets for the next day, you can enter the park the night before for a free "preview" 2 1/2 hours before the park closes. Since we had never been to Hershey Park before we were anxious to use this time to familiarize ourselves with the park and try out some of the fun rides.

The first thing we did was size ourselves up.


Every ride in the park posts what candy bar is eligible to ride. We thought it was funny that all four kids were a different candy bar!

Next we got maps to navigate. Adam enjoyed the maps more than some of the rides I think. He was always very serious about knowing where we were and where we were going. Everyone was trying to figure out where the rides were that they wanted to go on.











There was one realization that made Trent and I feel old. Julianne was so tall that for the first time she was too big for some of the rides. She is growing up so fast. Here she is with both Trent and me watching while the "little" kids rode some of the rides.









All in all we had a great time exploring the park, riding the rides and meeting the chocolate characters.








Can you tell Adam had fun????