The real fun of our trip start off Wednesday, as we left Harrisburg and headed toward the Philadelphia area. We decided to make a stop over in Hershey, PA, to the Hershey World of Chocolate.
Now first off, my thinking was that since we'd be going on a Wednesday morning, we'd pretty much be the only people there. Not quite. We got there around 10:30 am, and the park was PACKED already. We were only staying in the World of Chocolate part, which was very close to the entrance, so we didn't have to deal with the majority of the people at least.
The World of Chocolate was great though, if you are a fan of any type of Hershey chocolate, and if you are not, we might as well ship you off to an island in the middle of nowhere and leave you there. We managed to get away with only picking up two cookies and a brownie, otherwise we could have ended up gaining about 50 pounds with everything we wanted to eat there.
We hopped back in the car and drove another hour and a half or so to our ultimated destination, Langhorne, PA, home of Sesame Place. As I think I've mentioned before, Sesame Place is a theme park that is all about, of course, Sesame Street. It's actually more like 50% water park, 30% kids ride park, and 20% shows and dinners and games and other stuff to spend way too much money on.
Bella took to the place immediately, she was first happy to see some of the characters like Zoe, the Count and Bert and Ernie there. After a lap around the park, and a quick stop for photos with Elmo that Bella loved, we headed to one of the toddler pool areas and stayed there for a while. At some point, Bella got WAY over the water phobia that had plagued her for a while, and she had a great time running around the pools for her size. She even dragged Michele and I around by the hand to look at the other pools nearby. She was in very high spirits, despite missing out on a nap that day.
We then went to the Dinner with Big Bird and Friends, where Big Bird, Elmo and a bunch of other of her favorite characters all walk around and greet the kids at your table and do all sorts of other stuff. This got to be a bit much for Bella unfortunately, she didn't want to be around the characters after a while and just wanted to go play in the pool more. Oh well. We watched the nightly parade, and headed back to the hotel for a good night's rest.
What was surprising to us was that Bella wanted to go in the hotel swimming pool as soon as we got back, and she had loads of fun "swimming" in there with us (obviously she's still learning, so she just clung to us the whole time). We were pretty happy about this, since she was really brave and wasn't scared the whole time we were in there.
We headed back over to Sesame Place the next morning for a breakfast with Cookie Monster and some of the other characters again. Bella was still afraid of the character costumes unfortunately, so she didn't have a great time there again, but at least we tried. We met up with Michele's brother Mark, his wife Jenn and Bella's cousins Carolina and Augie shortly after that. As soon as we met them in the park, Bella said that she wanted to go on the roller coaster which is right near the entrance of the park. She had been saying this the day before too, but we figured she would chicken out as soon as we got near the ride. Turned out that wasn't the case, she was ready to go on the ride all the way to the end, but sadly she wasn't big enough to go on the ride just yet. Guess we have to wait for next time for that.
Bella had lots of fun playing with Carolina in the pools the rest of the afternoon, and they went on a couple of the kid rides and dragged us with them, attempting to get any of the adults as sick as possible on all of the spinning rides they went on (and nearly succeeding with me in the balloon ride Bell and Carolina and I went on). Mark's family took off earlier in the afternoon, so that they could head over to New Jersey to stay with Michele's Aunt Joanie, and we stayed at Sesame Place for a few more hours of fun for Bella.
After a few more hours in the pool, we headed back to our hotel for a rest for a bit, before a last minute decision to head over to Jersey as well to visit with the family. Bella pretty much collapsed for a nap for a while though, I had to take a picture since she was so cute being so cold out of it.
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