May 25, 2022-All Around Lake Michigan and Beyond

(click for today's pictures)

Since we came into town early last night, today was like a bonus day for us, and it was so nice. First thing that happened was that we slept late. That was certainly wonderful. Once we were all stirring, it didn't take us too long before we left.

We drove about 20 minutes to Lancaster to go to Beiler's Doughnuts. So I have this list of places and things that I want to go to and see. The list is old and I just keep adding to it. However, I just write the names of the places on this list and not any other details. So I wasn't really sure why we were eating at Beiler's Doughnuts today, but they were good doughnuts.

Their doughnuts were similar to Hurts Doughnuts at home except they were a little less obnoxious. Everything was done a bit more in moderation. There were really good-and pretty rich. We even threw a few pieces away since we couldn't finish them.

Another place on my list was the store Lidl. It is similar to an Aldi, but since we have neither at home, when I saw that we were close we stopped there. From the inside, I probably couldn't tell the difference between a Lidl and an Aldi except for the bakery. Today our Lidl store had a bakery where we bought pretzels for the kids and foccacia bread for Robby and I. 

We walked all around that store-some prices were much cheaper than things at home, but others were not. I am sure it would all probably balance out at the end, but we just bought the cheap things and filled the cart-sliced cheese, peach salsa, bread, pretzels, cokes, marinara-it was a random assortment.

After our doughnuting and shopping, we toured Turkey Hill. So this little self guided tour costs about 10 bucks a piece which is what you would expect. They had many cute little interactive things on the tour. I would say that we all enjoyed it....

However, what we all really enjoyed was the free samples. First we found the free tea and lemonade samples. That was self serve and really, how much tea and lemonade can you drink. Then we located the ice cream samples. I assumed that for a sample they would hand you a spoon with a taste of the ice cream on it. 

I was wrong-the unlimited ice cream samples should actually have been called "unlimited scoops of ice cream." This is where the Turkey Hill people started losing money-unlimited ice cream and the Dennies. We definitely all ate our 10 dollars worth of ice cream. Well, Keaton and Reagan didn't, but we tried our hardest to make up for them. The flavors that I had were cookies and cream, some graham cracker something and dutch chocolate. They were all delicious. We probably should have brought lunch so we could have stayed longer and had more ice cream.

We then headed back to the camper to let out Bentley. Robby and I then walked her a long ways in the pleasant weather. I guess this is the warmest weather that we have had lately-it was 70 degrees and sunny so it was perfect. We didn't stay at the camper too long because we soon were off again.

This time we went to Chocolate World-we had only really eaten doughnuts and ice cream today so we needed some chocolate to balance things out. This is Hershey's huge gift shop-it is massive. It is actually so big that there is a ride inside of it. After riding the ride which explains how chocolate is made, they gave us a huge piece of candy-one of those chocolate eggs filled with reeces pieces.

Then we walked around the gift shop some-finding a few things. We did buy a shirt for Campbell and Whitman along with an ornament. We have been here before but have never bought an ornament probably because things were super expensive. Keaton even spent some of her birthday money from her grandparents in this store. I think she did pick out something that she will like.

We had just about gathered all of our stuff, when I saw a worker lady talking to Robby. I thought he was asking her for information about her plan for tomorrow. Then Anderson walked up to me and said that the lady was asking about us tasting a new product. I accused him of kidding, but he was not.

The next thing I knew, the lady was leading us through an office where there was a bank of ipads. There were other people in there and only 6 spots so the kids all set down. They were given a cracker and water and the ipad talked them through what to do. After taking a bit of the cracker and then drinking some water, they tasted the candy bar in front of them.

I snuck a bite of Whitman's, and it tasted like a 3 Musketeer with caramel on top. After eating a few bites, they had to answer some questions. The ipads then asked questions like was there an aftertaste and click on all the words you would use to describe it. It was really interesting and fun-the lady then gave us all a free Hershey candy bar for participating. What a super fun experience and maybe we will see a new candy bar some day.

We walked around and tried to scope out Hershey Park for tomorrow-it looks massive, and we are worried that we will not know what to do and not be able to do the park efficiently. After exploring some, we then went back to the campsite.

Robby and I cleaned the camper-after this long it needs a good cleaning. Then we started a load of laundry before cooking supper. Tonight we had chicken quesadillas. So we have been gone for 11ish days and have about 8 or so more. We worked really hard on all of our meal planning-chicken tacos, chicken spaghetti, manicotti, chicken quesadillas, a night of leftovers, air fryer pizza, bbq sandwiches. Plus we have a few more meals we haven't eaten yet-chili, soup, another round of air fryer pizza and baked potatoes. You just can't bring ingredients for everything since space and freshness are issues. 

I'm not really sure why I mentioned all of this, but just the fact that we still have a planned meal that we are eating after this long is surprising to me-for some reason we can't seem to do this at home though. 

There were some walks tonight plus most folks watched some of the Hogs playing baseball this evening. Campbell, Keaton and Graham spent a good deal of time at the volleyball court. Apparently they were sliding in the sand-after they had taken showers tonight. Memories-they were making memories. (I like to keep reminding myself of that!)

Right now it is almost 10:30 and everyone has been in their beds for at least 30 minutes. Tomorrow will be an earlier morning and a busy day for sure.

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