Being a tourist close to home

Day 17 of 31

I go to Hershey's Chocolate World a few times a year.  It's close, it's free and my kids are still entertained by it, so why not?  Besides, you never know what else you'll happen to see.

Apparently, something new is being built at Chocolate World.  Who cares what it is, building something means heavy machinery.  I'm not really exaggerating, one of J's first words was machine.  Actually, it was "chine" for the longest time.   For many months at the library, he would only get machine books.  A book of any other genre had to be taken out by me, separately. 

Excavator

Very large jackhammer

Road roller and jackhammer

As far as machines go, I figure if you can't beat 'em, join 'em.  I encourage his love of machines and don't mind taking pictures and uploading them to the computer in his own folder "J's trucks"

Chocolate World itself never changes.  There is a short ride with singing cows and it tells the story about how chocolate is made, though I never pay that much attention.

Finally, I let the kids have some fun and we went to the dessert creation studio.  For $4.95, you get a cupcake, icing and two toppings to build your own cupcake.  The waitress also put edible paint "melted chocolate" on the table with paint brushes.  J had a great time adding the Reese's cups and sprinkles to his cupcake and painting on some color.  Not to my surprise, although he ate the candy, he didn't have one bite of cupcake or icing.  Also not to my surprise, the 11.5 month old did a pretty good job of eating what was left.

55,000 Snow Geese

I have a confession to make, I don't really like learning about things in nature.  I appreciate and respect nature, but it has never been my thing to learn the names of plants, animals, flowers, etc.  I just like being outside and enjoying fresh air.  So yesterday's activity may come as a bit of a surprise.

On Friday, a coworker told me about a place called Middle Creek Wildlife Area in Lancaster County.  I don't quite understand how this works year after year, but it's a known "pit stop" for migratory birds.  Now migratory birds are interesting.  How do they know where to go?  When do they decide to stop for a break?  Why do they all fly together? 

So, how did it go to go bird watching with a 4 year old and a baby?  I think that bird watching requires a little too much patience for us at this time.   You stand and you watch and then you stand and watch some more.  For a 4 year old boy who is very used to "watching something" on tv, this was not exactly high flying excitement.  That is, until we arrived at the meadow where the birds were sitting for the day. 

55,000 snow geese in one place is a lot of geese!  Mostly they were just sitting, but some were honking and some were flying.  We tried to visualize what it would be like when they all took off to fly at one time.   I had noticed that there was a goose fight on the other side of the road and J kept telling me which geese were having a fight.  He wasn't correct, but once he started to use his imagination, the day got much better. Of course at that point, we were sitting in our warm car and watching the geese out the window! 

My migratory bird questions are still unanswered and will probably remain unanswered but I'm happy for the adventure a flock of geese to remember.

This picture was probably about 20% of the field.  It was a lot of geese!