Phil Elmore: Individual Authoring Services

Hershey/Pennsylvania Dutch Country 2004
A Travelogue

Day One Day Two

On Memorial Day Weekend of 2004, my lovely wife and I traveled to Hershey, PA and the Pennsylvania Dutch Country. We chose the destination at the last minute. I actually booked the hotel that very morning. We set out early Saturday and made it to Hershey in roughly four and a half hours, including stops along the way.

Pennsylvania is a strange sort of nanny state when it comes to their road signs. I've never seen so many warnings, suggestions, helpful dots painted on the roadway to help you judge proper distance, reflectors, grooves, rumble strips, and so on. Every two or three feet there's a neon-schoolbus-yellow sign bearing a message ranging from the mundane ("Buckle Up Every Time") to the ominous ("Aggressive Driver High Crash Area"). Yet in Pennsylvania you can buy fireworks. I guess they only care what you're doing with your time if you're doing it in a car.

We rolled into Hershey before noon on Saturday, touring downtown briefly until we stopped at a gas station to get directions to our hotel. The website for the hotel provided directions that turned out to be more like guidelines than rules.

Downtown Hershey features streetlamps shaped like Hershey Kisses.

Our room at the Comfort Inn was clean and relatively spacious. There was odd art on the walls – pictures depicting hunting dogs pointing out prey – and the bathroom was quite small, with a sink unit that was actually outside the bathroom. Other than that, we had no complaints and were pleased with the accommodations. Our hotel also boasted its own duck pond, with several mating pairs of ducks and a bountiful crop of adorable, fuzzy ducklings.

The duck pond adjacent to the parking lot at the Comfort Inn.

A mother and her ducklings. There's a duck feeder nearby that takes quarters.

Meals in Hershey turned out to be something of an adventure, including a recurring theme revolving around the failure of utilities and supplies. We tried to eat lunch at a local Friendly's, only to discover that the power had failed in their kitchen and they were helpless to assist us. We ended up having a decent meal at a nearby Chinese buffet. Then we were off to ZOOAMERICA.

The zoo is fairly small but still entertaining. It's nestled in amidst the Hershey factory itself. You can't go far in Hershey without seeing those big yellow cocoa silos.

The lovely grounds of the zoo, with the Hershey silos in the background.

This stream was home to several incredibly large...

...carp, which swam to and fro as we watched from the bridge above.

The zoo was packed for Memorial Day weekend, but despite the crowds we enjoyed our stay. Among my favorite exhibits were the prairie dogs and the gators. Maybe they were crocodiles. I can never remember which are which. We got to see a dead wolf, too.

The prairie dog enclosure was laced with holes. We wondered if the zoo staff
fills them in from time to time to keep the little fellows from digging it all up.

One of my pet theories is that many zoos are full of dead animals, but nobody
notices because they figure the creatures are just sleeping. This is a wolf.

While we were visiting the gators (or crocodiles), an elderly man with a foreign accent pounded on the glass with his fist trying to get the creature to close its mouth. I could not imagine why, then or now. Another family lifted their stroller-bound child up to the reptile for a better view.

I would not blame this monster if he ate the occasional child.

"Dump her in," I muttered, tripping over yet another pack of screaming toddlers. My wife and I imagined that the gators fantasize all day long about children falling into their enclosure.

There was a very active bear in another area, who spent most of his time walking back and forth on a log. He looked friendly and happy. Recently, in my area, a young woman stumbled across a "private zoo" late at night. (It's likely she was intoxicated.) She tried to pet the bear and the bear bit off her arm, quite literally. Remember that when contemplating furry, friendly looking bears.

This bear spent his morning walking back and forth, back and forth.

We did not visit Hersheypark while in Pennsylvania, but no visit to the area would be complete without a tour of Chocolate World. This is a delightful place that is essentially a giant gift shop complete with indoctrination and education programs that explain to you why Milton Hershey was a wonderful man who loved everyone (especially his wife). I am completely serious about this, too – he really was, and he really did, if the story of his life and work is even half true. Apart from planning the entire town of Hershey, Milton founded the Milton Hershey School for underprivileged children. I actually went to college with a gifted writer named Paul Ford, who attended the Milton Hershey School prior to enrolling at Alfred University.

Hershey's Chocolate World, a frenetic but sweet place.

This chocolate cow is a favorite among visitors taking pictures.

This slightly more cosmopolitan cow is near the chocolate cow.

Inside Chocolate World, my wife and I rode a tour through a highly stylized representation of the Hershey factory, in which we learned all about the chocolate-making process. (It is highly unlikely that the factory workers are giant anthropomorphic Hershey Kisses, so I suspected from the beginning that we were not in the real factory.) The ride is conducted on cars much like those in a haunted house, connected to a rotating platform that is always in motion. If the Hershey people understand anything, it's how to process large numbers of guests. The very end of the tour featured lots of pictures of smiling, happy people whose lighted visages were accompanied by some sort of music that made us feel like we were being programmed to love Hershey and all it represents. Come to think of it, I do feel that way. I guess it worked.

The interior of Chocolate World was incredibly busy and full of sights and sounds.

Perhaps the best – and strangest – part of the day was the trolley tour we took from Chocolate World through Hershey. The trolley took us to all the local sights, from the Milton Hershey school to the Hershey homestead and (of course) past the factory. The tour was conducted by two extremely cheerful, extremely strange tour guides who spent a lot of time trying to get us to sing old-time songs from the laminated song sheets we found on our seats. Nobody makes me sing "Bye, Bye, Blackbird." Nobody.

We found these song sheets on
our seats as we boarded.

Our tour guides, seen here between songs. The guy on the right claimed to be
named "Wilbur." I found myself wondering just how many Wilburs kill themselves.

The shtick for the tour is that "Wilbur" leaves the trolley early on, only to be replaced by the same actor wearing a variety of silly costumes and faking (badly) a variety of silly accents. He appeared as Milton Hershey's dad, or something, and also as Mrs. Hershey, and a Swedish Chef who sounded like the one from the Muppets. I suspect the suicide rate among the Wilburs is very high. Think about it – if you spent your work days doing this, you'd eat a bullet, too.

The trolley tour passes the Hershey factory from multiple angles.

The secret to the trolley ride is, of course, that "Wilbur" gets on the back of the trolley in between stops and changes clothes from the costumes hanging on the back. I tailed one of the trolleys in order to get this shot to satisfy my curiosity.

The secret of the trolley tour caught on camera. "Wilbur" is changing
costumes in between stops, probably contemplating the sweet release of death.

That evening, in search of dinner, we tried the local Taco Bell only to be informed that they were out of lettuce. I pity the poor people of Pennsylvania, who are apparently unable to go to the grocery store for lettuce in times of dire need. We ended up driving to nearby Harrisburg, where we saw the stunning Pennsylvania state capital, ate dinner at a Friendly's not yet experiencing anarchy, and visited the local Borders. (There I telephoned my special projects editor for The Martialist, as he'd left me a couple of messages and didn't know I was out of town. "I didn't call you because I'm in Hershey, Pennsylvania," I told him. "Actually, I'm standing in a Borders in Harrisburg.")

Day One Day Two