Hershey Park

A Pennsylvania town-turned-theme park celebrating all things Hershey. It is where Hershey chocolate candy is actually manufactured and born. It is also where all the streetlights are giant hershey kisses and every restaurant competes with the one next door for the most outlandish recipe bursting with chocolate bliss.
I remembered going there as a child for some reason and washing down melted chocolate sandwiches with chocolate milk served in a hard chocolate cup. It was every child's dream come true, similar in some respects to Homer's little fantasy about running around in a chocolate world and taking a bite out of a chocolate bunny as it hops by.
Anyway, my fiance and I were road tripping out east recently and happened to come across an exit for the fabulous Hershey Park somewhere outside of Philly. I had forgotten all about the existence of that place. Being the chocolate aficionados we are even in our mid-twenties, I was able to convince him to check it out.
Needless to say, as an older and slightly more mature traveller I was disappointed by the realization that it was not the candy wonderland I had remembered from my youth, but little more than a huge, plastic and dirty chunk of consumeristic Americana.
We still found time to stop at a diner for a chocolate sandwich before getting back on the road.

HersheyPark is a great place to take your kids of all ages. The park is especially clean, somewhat cheap, and has a plethora of bitchin' rollercoasters.
Founded as a small town for employees of The Milton Hershey Chocolate Company, Hershey soon budded into a small city centered around the park, which became an amusment park fifty years after the town was chartered.
The highlight of the park after it's opening was its copy of the Coney Island Comet, as well as its large ferris wheel. Soon, as the park drew more and more people from around the state, the park modernized and began expanding by buying more land and more rides. In the mid-seventies, Hershey Park launched a national ad campaign, and the park began to draw huge amounts of customers.

Today, Hershey Park is home to many famous roller coasters including the "Great Bear", and iverted/suspended coaster, "The Wildcat" the fastest wooden coaster on the east coast, "The Lightning Racer" a duel coaster where two trains race on two seperate tracks, and "The Sooper Dooper Looper". Hershey also is home to a handfull of water rides, like "Tidal Force" where you hit a drop and cause a wave almost two hundred feet long. Hershey also has an attraction called Chocolate World, where you see the processes used to make Hershey's Chocolate.

The park is a great family park which is all centered around chocolate. Commercialized? yes. Hella fun? Hell yes. How do I know all this? Well, I have been going twice a year since I was eight.