Wow, these past few weeks have been absolutely amazing!! Being in Disney World from June 11th to the 19th, in Winnipeg, Manitoba from the 21st to July 1st, and of course, being with my wonderful boyfriend Chris the entire time!
We have countless stories to tell from both trips, including some reviews of restaurants and attractions. For all of these stories and more, keep an eye on our vacation website, VacationNerds.com and if you have any questions about anywhere that we visited, don't hesitate to ask!
Showing posts with label vacation nerds. Show all posts
Showing posts with label vacation nerds. Show all posts
Saturday, July 3, 2010
Thursday, June 10, 2010
Vacation Time!!!!
Hey Everyone! That Disney vacation that I have been talking about for about 8 months now has FINALLY come!!! So from June 11th to the 19th, I will be in Walt Disney World with Chris! Because of this, the blog will probably be a bit quiet. In the meantime, check out these few sites for information:
For information on our trip, check out VacationNerds.com and follow me on twitter at twitter.com/lady_aurora for up to the minute happenings on our vacation.
Check out the links on the side of my blog, you can now pre-purchase tickets to Toy Story 3, coming out on June 18th, from Fandango!
Do not forget to join Chris and I for our Video Chat on Monday June 14th from our hotel room at Animal Kingdom Lodge! Join us on the Cosmic Reid Ustream page to watch and chat with us! Make a free ustream account to use the chat option, only takes a minute!
Thanks for checking out the blog and I hope you enjoy following Chris and I on our vacation!
For information on our trip, check out VacationNerds.com and follow me on twitter at twitter.com/lady_aurora for up to the minute happenings on our vacation.
Check out the links on the side of my blog, you can now pre-purchase tickets to Toy Story 3, coming out on June 18th, from Fandango!
Do not forget to join Chris and I for our Video Chat on Monday June 14th from our hotel room at Animal Kingdom Lodge! Join us on the Cosmic Reid Ustream page to watch and chat with us! Make a free ustream account to use the chat option, only takes a minute!
Thanks for checking out the blog and I hope you enjoy following Chris and I on our vacation!
Monday, June 7, 2010
Hershey's Exciting Addition
Yea, I know, this is a Disney blog mainly, but I am a vacationer and I frequent Hersheypark because of how close it is to my house, so I figured I would share a cool experience I had with you all. Don't worry, I will get back to the Disney stuff after this, especially with the Disney trip coming on Friday!!
This past weekend I went to visit Hersheypark with my family for my younger sister Emily's 17th Birthday. We all had gotten season passes to the park, making it easier to go more often than we usually do, but this birthday visit is something that my family and I have done for years. We had gone earlier in the week with our passes and saw that a new interactive experience had opened in Chocolate World, right next to Hersheypark. This Interactive experience is called "Create Your Own Candy Bar" and, as the name might slightly hint to, the point of the experience is to create your own, one of a kind candy bar! My sister and I had been eyeing it all weekend and so, on Sunday morning, my mother was kind enough to take the time out of going to the park to do the experience.
The price for the experience is $14.95, which I know sounds like a lot, but once you see everything there is to do and you get to the finished product, you realize that the price is not as bad as it seems.
Note that I am not sure of the age restrictions for this. From what I saw, parents are not able to go in with their children unless you pay for yourself to go, but the children I saw doing this were 8 and 9 years old. I am not sure what the rules are if you have a younger child doing the experience or if a young child is able to. While parents may not be able to go in with their children, they are able to watch their child go through most of the process via outdoor windows looking into the factory.
After you get your personalized ticket with your name, you walk to the entrance of the factory, which has been built right next to the Bake Shoppe and underneath where the Kit Kat Cafe used to be. Once there, you show the factory worker your tickets and they give you hairnets to put on and for the gentlemen, beard nets if necessary. When you go inside, there are lockers to put your bags and jewelry in, but you are allowed to take cameras with you inside the factory. After putting your things away, get your apron, sanitize your hands, and you are taken to a room where you will watch a brief video on what you are about to do.
Once the video is over, you are taken to a room with touch screen computers. In this room, you are able to pick your chocolate to use and your ingredients. You walk up to a screen and scan your ticket so that your information will save. The chocolate choices are milk, dark and white, though when we were there, they only had milk chocolate. They had just opened this week so not everything was there. They say they hope to have the dark and white chocolate as choices later on in the summer months.
For the inside of your bar, you have 6 choices of what to put in and you can only choose 3. The options available when we were there were rice crispies, chocolate cookie bits, vanilla chips, blueberries, graham cracker pieces and rainbow sprinkles. We were told these choices will probably be around for a while and for your nut lovers out there, do not expect to see peanuts or almonds added to the choices of ingredients any time soon due to allergies.
After you make your choices for your candy bar, the next room is the large factory room. You scan your ticket once again and the chocolate shell is placed on a conveyor belt, into which the ingredients you selected are dropped into. With your ingredients in place, the shell of the bar is moved into this, what I will call a chocolate waterfall, causing chocolate to pour over the entire candy bar and fill it in. The bar is then put on a shaking belt that evens out all of the chocolate and ingredients and then it is moved into a cooler, a slow moving belt, where your candy bar will be for about 10 minutes to harden.
While you are waiting for your candy bar to cool, you are taken to another room with touch screens where you can create your own wrapper for your candy bar! There are templates that you can choose from or you can create your own using different colored backgrounds and pictures supplied.
When your candy bar is done being cooled, you are able to watch it slide into the container area, where it will be put in a small box that is personalized with your name and then it is slid down to where a worker is waiting with a nice metal tin to put the box in and your wrapper design is put around that.
Once you receive your candy bar, you can take your hairnet and apron off, get your belongings out of your locker and off you go to enjoy the rest of the day in Hershey!
I found this experience to be a lot of fun and educational about how chocolate is made. It is fun for all ages, as I said before I am not sure how young the age limit is, if there is one, but definitely from about 7 and up are able to do this and enjoy it. In the group with my sister and I, we had a woman and her older mother, proving it really is for any age! When you go to Hershey, I would highly recommend this Create Your Own Candy Bar experience!
This past weekend I went to visit Hersheypark with my family for my younger sister Emily's 17th Birthday. We all had gotten season passes to the park, making it easier to go more often than we usually do, but this birthday visit is something that my family and I have done for years. We had gone earlier in the week with our passes and saw that a new interactive experience had opened in Chocolate World, right next to Hersheypark. This Interactive experience is called "Create Your Own Candy Bar" and, as the name might slightly hint to, the point of the experience is to create your own, one of a kind candy bar! My sister and I had been eyeing it all weekend and so, on Sunday morning, my mother was kind enough to take the time out of going to the park to do the experience.
The price for the experience is $14.95, which I know sounds like a lot, but once you see everything there is to do and you get to the finished product, you realize that the price is not as bad as it seems.
Note that I am not sure of the age restrictions for this. From what I saw, parents are not able to go in with their children unless you pay for yourself to go, but the children I saw doing this were 8 and 9 years old. I am not sure what the rules are if you have a younger child doing the experience or if a young child is able to. While parents may not be able to go in with their children, they are able to watch their child go through most of the process via outdoor windows looking into the factory.
After you get your personalized ticket with your name, you walk to the entrance of the factory, which has been built right next to the Bake Shoppe and underneath where the Kit Kat Cafe used to be. Once there, you show the factory worker your tickets and they give you hairnets to put on and for the gentlemen, beard nets if necessary. When you go inside, there are lockers to put your bags and jewelry in, but you are allowed to take cameras with you inside the factory. After putting your things away, get your apron, sanitize your hands, and you are taken to a room where you will watch a brief video on what you are about to do.
Once the video is over, you are taken to a room with touch screen computers. In this room, you are able to pick your chocolate to use and your ingredients. You walk up to a screen and scan your ticket so that your information will save. The chocolate choices are milk, dark and white, though when we were there, they only had milk chocolate. They had just opened this week so not everything was there. They say they hope to have the dark and white chocolate as choices later on in the summer months.
For the inside of your bar, you have 6 choices of what to put in and you can only choose 3. The options available when we were there were rice crispies, chocolate cookie bits, vanilla chips, blueberries, graham cracker pieces and rainbow sprinkles. We were told these choices will probably be around for a while and for your nut lovers out there, do not expect to see peanuts or almonds added to the choices of ingredients any time soon due to allergies.
After you make your choices for your candy bar, the next room is the large factory room. You scan your ticket once again and the chocolate shell is placed on a conveyor belt, into which the ingredients you selected are dropped into. With your ingredients in place, the shell of the bar is moved into this, what I will call a chocolate waterfall, causing chocolate to pour over the entire candy bar and fill it in. The bar is then put on a shaking belt that evens out all of the chocolate and ingredients and then it is moved into a cooler, a slow moving belt, where your candy bar will be for about 10 minutes to harden.
While you are waiting for your candy bar to cool, you are taken to another room with touch screens where you can create your own wrapper for your candy bar! There are templates that you can choose from or you can create your own using different colored backgrounds and pictures supplied.
When your candy bar is done being cooled, you are able to watch it slide into the container area, where it will be put in a small box that is personalized with your name and then it is slid down to where a worker is waiting with a nice metal tin to put the box in and your wrapper design is put around that.
Once you receive your candy bar, you can take your hairnet and apron off, get your belongings out of your locker and off you go to enjoy the rest of the day in Hershey!
I found this experience to be a lot of fun and educational about how chocolate is made. It is fun for all ages, as I said before I am not sure how young the age limit is, if there is one, but definitely from about 7 and up are able to do this and enjoy it. In the group with my sister and I, we had a woman and her older mother, proving it really is for any age! When you go to Hershey, I would highly recommend this Create Your Own Candy Bar experience!
To see a virtual tour of the factory, click here.
To see the main page for Create Your Own Candy Bar, click here.
To see everything that Chocolate World has to offer, click here.
To see other websites related to the Hershey area, along with pictures and a trip report from there, visit Chris' and my vacation site, VacationNerds.com.
To see the main page for Create Your Own Candy Bar, click here.
To see everything that Chocolate World has to offer, click here.
To see other websites related to the Hershey area, along with pictures and a trip report from there, visit Chris' and my vacation site, VacationNerds.com.
Tuesday, June 1, 2010
Taking Vacation to the Next Level
For a little while now, Chris and I have had a blog called "The Many Adventures of the Vacation Nerds", where we would update our trip information and talk about our vacations together. I had become a bit frustrated with that blog because I had some ideas of what I wanted to do with it and it just wouldn't let me! So for the last week or so I have been feverishly working to bring you the brand new website VacationNerds.com!
On this site, you can see write ups on past trips, pictures from those trips as well, and information on the present trips that we are going to take! There is a HUGE page devoted to the links that we use to plan our vacations and links that, we hope, will help you to plan a vacation to some of the places we have visited!
One thing that Chris and I both love is feedback and questions! If you have any questions about places we have visited, if there is anything you would like to see on the site, or if you have an idea for a place we should visit, please send us an email to vacationnerds@gmail.com.
Chris and I will have lots of information about our upcoming Disney trip on the site, there is a lot already on the Present Vacation Plans page.
We both hope that you will enjoy reading about our adventures on VacationNerds.com
On this site, you can see write ups on past trips, pictures from those trips as well, and information on the present trips that we are going to take! There is a HUGE page devoted to the links that we use to plan our vacations and links that, we hope, will help you to plan a vacation to some of the places we have visited!
One thing that Chris and I both love is feedback and questions! If you have any questions about places we have visited, if there is anything you would like to see on the site, or if you have an idea for a place we should visit, please send us an email to vacationnerds@gmail.com.
Chris and I will have lots of information about our upcoming Disney trip on the site, there is a lot already on the Present Vacation Plans page.
We both hope that you will enjoy reading about our adventures on VacationNerds.com
Saturday, April 10, 2010
June Trip Changes
Yes indeed, there have been some exciting additions to Chris' and my vacation in June!! What are they exactly?? Well, you will have to visit our joint site for yourself and find out! It is only a click away, at Vacationnerds@wordpress.com!
Friday, February 12, 2010
A new site full of Craaaazyness!
In honor of the passing of the 120 day mark until Chris' and my Disney trip, I thought I would share with you all our latest project:
The Many Adventures of the Vacation Nerds
Chris thought of the name, I just made it Disney related, hee hee!
This new blog is one that both Chris and I are writing about our vacations together. Since we live so far away, the only times we have seen each other are on vacations. So when we do see each other, we have gone lots of different places and seen different stuff. We thought we would share these vacationing experiences with everyone, possibly inspiring other people to have adventures and visit new places!
I will still make Major updates on here about my Disney trip and vacations but for all the details, visit vacationnerds.wordpress.com.
Chris thought of the name, I just made it Disney related, hee hee!
This new blog is one that both Chris and I are writing about our vacations together. Since we live so far away, the only times we have seen each other are on vacations. So when we do see each other, we have gone lots of different places and seen different stuff. We thought we would share these vacationing experiences with everyone, possibly inspiring other people to have adventures and visit new places!
I will still make Major updates on here about my Disney trip and vacations but for all the details, visit vacationnerds.wordpress.com.
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