Relevant '11 - Hershey!

Since the Relevant Conference didn't start until Thursday evening, those of us who had gotten there early didn't have anything to do until late afternoon. Aurie had driven over so we (meaning me, Aurie, Michelle, Kristi, Kristi's mom, and Christina) hopped in her car and headed to the chocolate capital of the world. Okay, maybe not, but it has to be one of the biggest chocolate attractions ever. Hershey!Since we really didn't have the time or money to do anything but the free tour, we just decided on that. It was enough, in my opinion. Very educational!

After walking through hallways with a timeline of how Milton Hershey started the business and town, how chocolate is harvested, etc, we headed down to the cart ride that would take us on the automated tour. We are waiting for our turn on the carts. Moving floors, moving carts, I'm surprised I didn't perform one of my classic falling down numbers!
Our tour guide. I don't remember his name. Kiddo would have said he was cheese-whiz. Get it? A cow? Cheese? Okay, technically he's a bull but work with me, people. Anyway, he was followed by these bovine beauties singing the most obnoxious song that's STILL stuck in my head..."♪♫ Hershey's Milk Chock-lit... ♫♪" (and how cool is it that I just figured out how to make musical notes???)From this point it got really interesting. The tour went from getting the cacao from tropical regions, through processing it into edible chocolate, to packaging. I wish I had a video of it all because it really was interesting.The famous kisses in production.

I had to take this picture, since this is my guys' favorite thing Hershey makes. They couldn't live without it. I think chocolate milk runs in their veins. One of these days they're going to turn into this guy...At least he's friendly.

After the tour we had a nice little guy hand us some cookies 'n cream white chocolate drops that were heavenly. It was worth it just for that chocolate!

Then we went shopping. We mostly stayed in the merchandise area, but look at all of this chocolate...As wonderful as it looked and smelled (oh, and it did smell divine in that place!), we knew we could get the same stuff at the store much cheaper. Heh.

I did get Kiddo a little something from the merchandise side, but he doesn't know it yet, so shhhhhh....

Now that I've told you about our days before the conference, I'll end the week with what happened to a group of us the night before. We were the talk of the weekend. Even got our own Twitter hashtag. You won't want to miss that!