Halloween in Hersheypark

For the third year in a row we celebrated Halloween in Hershey, PA at the Hersheypark in the Dark event. Even though we’ve gone for the past few years, this year was by far my favorite experience!

Hersheypark is about 2 ½ hours from our house, so we got there around lunchtime on Saturday. When we checked into the Hershey Lodge, we were surprised with a fabulous canvas bag filled with all sorts of goodies… including a ton of candy!

Jack immediately stole all of the Twizzlers and then once we changed into our costumes he filled my leather bag with handfuls of ‘gold doubloons’, aka caramel kisses to eat throughout the day.

Here we are in our costumes:

We took the shuttle over to the park and spent the afternoon riding a ton of rides. The weather was perfect – not too hot and not too cold – and the entire park was decorated with pumpkins, hay and cornstalks everywhere.

After a couple hours, we decided to walk over to check out Chocolate World, starting with the free Chocolate Tour ride where you can watch all the steps to how chocolate is made and then get a super fresh mini candy bar on your way out. Once again, our Hershey friends spoiled us and provided us with tickets to the 4D Chocolate Mystery movie, Chocolate Tasting, and the chance to Create Our Own Candy Bars.

Even though we’ve been to Hersheypark many times, we’ve never done any of these activities so it was really cool to try them all! Travis and I really enjoyed the chocolate tasting and learned a lot about the different flavors that make up each type of chocolate. Of course, Jack was more interested in eating the chocolate and playing with the flavor wheel on the iPad touch-screen.

All three of us agreed that the Create Your Own Candy Bar was by far our favorite activity. We were first suited up for the experience by having aprons and hairnets added to our outfits:

Then, we used touch-screens to choose exactly what we wanted in our special candy bars and the packaging. Once the choices were made, we were able to actually watch the bars being made and the ingredients added in. At the very end, our special Hershey’s chocolate bars were placed in a really cool metal container and wrapped with our specially designed packaging.

This experience usually costs $15.95 per person and we really felt that you got your money’s worth between the activities and the HUGE chocolate bar you get to take home to eat!

By time we were done with all the activities at Chocolate World and hopped on the shuttle to get back to the Lodge, it was already past 9pm. As much as we would have liked to go over to ZooAmerica with our flashlights to check out the animals at dark or visit the Hershey Gardens for their pumpkin glow, we decided to order a pizza from room service and call it a night.

The next morning we had breakfast at Lebbie Lebkicher’s (named after Milton Hershey’s life-long friend), checked out of our room and took the shuttle back over to the park. We spent a few more hours on the rides, did another tour and ate even more Hershey’s candy.

We were all pretty exhausted by time we left, but couldn’t skip one of my favorite stops for a late lunch/early dinner before we left. If you’re at Hershey, you MUST go to the Hershey Grill. Every year it is one of our favorite stops, as the food is delicious and they have an entire menu of Hershey’s chocolate martinis! We filled up with an amazing last meal and then hit the road for home.

All in all, it was an absolutely wonderful weekend away and I highly recommend it for anyone looking for a fun and YUMMY getaway!

Seeing as how we survived for most of the weekend on Hershey’s candy, what is your absolute FAVORITE candy?

 

Disclaimer: Hershey provided us with tickets to Hersheypark and the Chocolate World attractions, as well as a discounted hotel rate. Thank you so much to our friends at Hershey for making this trip possible. Even though it was ‘sponsored’ by Hershey, please know that all thoughts, yummy noises and calories eaten are my own.