The Chocolate Vortex

This post was supposed to be mostly about getting to Atlantic City and checking it out. However, we stopped at Hershey's Choclate World at 9:02 this morning and everything changed. Marilyn was strangely excited to be there. I figured it was going to be a chocolate store with a little tour to show the process. But no! As soon as we walked in, we were sucked in by the Chocolate Vortex! I haven't been to Disney Land so don't really have a point of reference, but this place was crazy. It had every kind of chocolate thing that you could imagine and some that you couldn't. There were happy, smiley people everywhere wanting to help you! And there was a Reese's Pieces Man walking around! Yikes!

Hershey makes many so many more things than chocolate kisses.

Marilyn couldn't believe that Hershey made her favourite candy, Twizzlers! And, they even came in rainbow colours.

At this point, I walked away and browsed for a few minutes, 5 at the most. When I came back, one of the chocolate smiley guys was helping Marilyn put all her purchases into a basket! I admit that I added the chocolate coated almonds, but that was it!

To top it all off, we did go on the tour but it was Disney-esque due to the singing animatronic cows. And, we had to ride in a silly chocolate train. Luckily, it wasn't crowded yet and we had a whole car to ourselves! If you have kids and are in the Hershey PA area, it would be a great place to stop even though I was just there for the chocolate. 

After that interlude, we drove through Hershey, marvelling at how beautiful the town was. Milton Hershey apparently donated a great deal of money to the town and I wish that we'd been able to take more time to look around. As it was, we needed to get on the road to Cape May NJ. It turned out to be a quaint resort town on the sea that reminded us of Key West and Provincetown. There were lots of shops and restaurants and old, restored homes. There was also a nice looking beach but, for some reason, they were charging just to walk on it! I refuse to pay to walk on a beach so we walked on the boardwalk beside the beach and looked from there. 

The highlight of Cape May was our lunch. We stopped at a place on the pedestrian mall called The Fish Market. I had a crab roll that was incredible. It had, by Toronto standards, about $30 worth of large lump crabmeat and next to no filler. 

Marilyn had a lobster quesadilla that was full of large chunks of lobster. I know because I had to help her finish it off! 

On the way out of Cape May, we saw many of these large vacation homes. We weren't sure if they were family places or rentals but they would be a great place to stay in any case!

As an afterthought, we went to our hotel in Atlantic City! It's right on the boardwalk and we set out immediately to see what was around. Of course, it started to rain, but it was warm rain so we continued walking and saw many of the sights. If you've been to Vegas, Atlantic City pales by comparison, but it has the ocean and the boardwalk which count for something! Due to our largish lunch, we didn't feel like too much for dinner. So we ended up at Jimmy Buffet's Margaritaville for what was supposed to be a snacky type dinner. We started off with a beer (Marilyn) and the It's 5:00 Somewhere Margarita for me. Not my usual, but I needed to try it as it had 2 types of rum, tequila, and some orange and pineapple juices. Our dinner snack, the Volcano Nachos, were not in the snack category and we did not finish this mountain of food! Luckily, we had a 2 km walk back to our hotel and for the day, we did 18 km! 

This is the boardwalk on the way back. The lights in the sky are not stars. We actually thought it was part of a light show but it was hundreds and hundreds of seagulls flying around in the bright lights!