We started this morning by driving back to Hershey from where we stayed in Harrisburg. We wanted to visit the Hershey Botanical Gardens. We drove back to Chocolate World, figuring we would see signs to the gardens, but we somehow missed them. We asked the teenage male worker at the gate where the botanical gardens were, and he looked confused. “Motanic gardens?” he asked. “I’ve never heard of those.

After we briefly checked out Chocolate World to see if it was still crazy at 9:45 am (it was), we plugged the word “garden” into the GPS. It was six tenths of a mile away, next to the luxury Hershey hotel. Away we went.

Meredith and I are members of Akron’s Stan Hywet Hall and Gardens, and as such, we get in free to many gardens around the country. Hershey’s is one of those, so we were allowed in. We started with the butterfly house, which has something like four hundred butterflies in it. I love butterfly houses – they are magical. We got to see butterflies eating up close, using their really long proboscis, which they store by rolling up into a small coil in front of their faces. There were all-black ones and violet ones and orange ones, as well as others. They had one called a Luna moth that was imprisoned in a mesh cage because it seems it lays its eggs all over. Oddly, in its moth stage, it has no mouth or way to eat, so I guess it must eat a ton as a caterpillar.

We roamed out to the garden proper. It started as a rose garden, and the roses are still spectacular. They have added a Japanese garden, a rock garden, and an arboretum, as well as other flower gardens. The entire space is about twenty-three acres, so it is a manageable size. We were able to tour the entire park in about two hours. We still had time, so we went and ogled the Hershey Hotel. It is lovely, with multiple balconies and an interior enclosed fake courtyard. My guess is the rooms cost more than the $125 we spent on our hotel in Harrisburg.

We got on the road around 1:00 after trying to find somewhere to eat that didn’t have a thirty-minute wait. We figured we could eat on the road at a less busy time (2:30, as it turned out). We got to Newark with no issues and little traffic, and had a few confusing moments along the way involving parking, and then checking bags/getting boarding passes (why they have international passengers use a kiosk is beyond me – the kiosk always asks us to get an agent). In the end, though, we got to out gate about three and a half hours before takeoff, which was pretty good for an airport we have never used.

Lord willing and everything goes smoothly, the next stop will be Iceland!