It was only a little over an hour's drive from Gettysburg to Hershey, and we could not stand to be that close to the Sweetest Place on Earth without stopping. The truth is that we loved our first visit so much that a second one felt overdue. That first trip was back in July of 2012, when we were novice campers in our first popup-camper traveling with our 7 year old son. What I remember most is how brutally hot it was that summer, and how the popup's little air conditioner kept freezing up on us. This time we rolled in with the Wild Blue Yonder and a very different forecast, with cooler temperatures and rain coming and going across both of the days we had planned. We only gave Hershey two days, because we had already seen the big-ticket attractions on that first trip, so this visit was less about checking boxes and more about enjoying the chocolate, and the food.
Hershey's Chocolate World
Chocolate World is the easiest place to start, mostly because it is free and it is indoors, which made it a natural choice on a rainy afternoon. The free chocolate tour ride walks you through how a Hershey bar gets made, and the store at the center of it all is the largest Hershey's shop you will ever stand in. If you have never been, it is worth an hour even if chocolate is not your whole reason for coming to town.
The Breweries
The weather on our arrival day was not cooperating, so we did what any sensible travelers would do when the sky opens up and went looking for beer. Hershey has a good number of breweries, and the afternoon turned into a small lesson I keep relearning as I travel the country. The biggest, most famous brewery in town is almost never the one making the best beer.
Our first stop was Rotunda Brew Pub, the smaller and quieter of the two we hit that afternoon, and it turned out to be the best beer of the stop. The IPAs were sharp and clean, but it was the sours that got me, bright and puckering with real fruit behind them, and I am not usually a sour drinker. Rotunda made me one for an afternoon. From there we went to Tröegs, which is the one the crowds drive to, a genuinely massive operation with a few hundred people moving through it while we were there. The beer was fine. For me it was standard American IPAs down the line, nothing wrong with it and nothing that stayed with me, which is how it tends to go at the big production houses. Volume and average beer travel together more often than not, and the little brewpub across town was making the more interesting pour by a wide margin.
We ended the day back out at Moo-Duck with a Mistopheles Chocolate Stout. There was no way I was spending a day in this town and not closing it out on a chocolate beer, dark and rich and tasting like the place we were in.
Revelry (Dinner)
Dinner that night was at Revelry, the restaurant inside the Hershey Lodge. On the way in I had spotted a big bowl of Hershey Kisses parked right by the hostess stand, and the hostess told me to help myself to as many as I liked. I asked whether they were truly unlimited, just to be sure I had heard her right, and she said yes. I had spent the whole afternoon at the breweries before dinner, so I was making the trip past that stand fairly often over the course of the meal, and every time I came back through I grabbed another handful. She never objected, so I never stopped taking them.
I had a truly amazing steak and one of the best meals of the trip. I had a prime ribeye that came out cooked exactly right, a hard sear over a warm deep red center, excellent on its own with nothing else needed. Revelry added something anyway, because the other thing you learn fast in this town is that Hershey will put chocolate in just about anything whether it belongs there or not. My steak arrived with a chocolate steak sauce on the side. It was thin and muddy and did not taste a lot like chocolate, so after one dutiful dip I pushed it aside and let the steak stand on its own. I'm not a believer of sauce on steak anyway as a good piece of beef shouldn't need it, but I had to try chocolate sauce on it at least once.
Dessert put the "sweetest place on Earth" back in the win column. I had a crème brûlée set on top of a slice of cheesecake, a stack I did not know I needed until the spoon cracked through the top, and Donna went with a molten chocolate lava cake that ran the moment she cut into it. She slid it across the table so I could steal a bite, and it was delicious.
The Chocolatier (Lunch)
We saved one more chocolate experiment for our last day. We stopped for lunch at The Chocolatier, the sit-down restaurant tucked between Hersheypark and Chocolate World, and I ordered the chocolate chicken wings mostly out of curiosity. They had no business being as good as they were. The sauce hit smoky and sweet up front like a good barbecue, then turned on a low cocoa on the back end that kept it from ever going candy-sweet. After the steak sauce had flopped the night before, I walked in expecting another gimmick and got some great wings. When Hershey decides to put chocolate in your dinner and it hits, you understand why the whole place is built on the stuff.
A Look Back at the Hershey We Saw the First Time
Since we had done the marquee attractions on our 2012 trip, here is what stood out from that first visit, in case you are planning a first trip of your own.
Hersheypark
Hersheypark was the centerpiece of our first visit, and with a seven-year-old in tow we spent a long, happy day trying to beat the heat by enjoying the waterpark. In addition to the water attractions, it is a full-size amusement park with coasters for the thrill-seekers and plenty of gentler rides for the little ones, and it is easy to fill an entire day there.
The Hershey Story Museum
The Hershey Story, the museum down on Chocolate Avenue, turned out to be one of the stops I remember most on that first trip. I walked in knowing Hershey as a candy brand and walked out genuinely impressed by the man behind it. Milton Hershey was born on a farm near here in 1857, had only a fourth-grade education, and failed at candy-making more than once before he ever found success. Hershey cracked the formula for mass-producing milk chocolate, using fresh local milk in what became known as the Hershey Process, and that breakthrough turned a rich man's delicacy into a nickel bar that any kid in America could afford.
Milton Hershey did more than make chocolate here. He built the entire town. When he put up his factory in 1903, he set it down in the middle of dairy farmland near his birthplace, and since there was no town out there, he planned one from the ground up. Instead of the grim company town that was common in that era, he laid out tree-lined streets with houses of varying styles, modern plumbing and electricity, a bank, schools, churches, parks, and even a trolley system so his workers were never forced to live under his thumb. Years later, when the Great Depression hit, he kept around 600 local men employed through what became known as the Great Building Campaign, putting them to work on the Hotel Hershey, the theatre, the sports arena, and the stadium. When someone pointed out that the new steam shovels could each do the work of forty men, he reportedly answered, "Take them off. Hire 40 men."
What stuck with me even more was what he did with the fortune that chocolate built. He and his wife Catherine could not have children of their own, so in 1909 they founded a school for orphaned boys, now the Milton Hershey School. The first students actually lived in The Homestead, Milton's own birthplace farmhouse, before the school grew into the stunning campus that looks out over the town today.
What ties the whole thing together is what became of his money. In 1918, three years after Catherine died, Milton quietly placed his entire fortune, around $60 million and more than a billion dollars in today's terms, into a trust to benefit that school. That trust still holds a controlling interest in the Hershey Company. The chocolate funds the town and the kids, and it has been running that way for a century. So, next time you go to eat a piece of Hershey’s chocolate, instead of feeling guilty, know that you are doing it for the kids.
One last detail from the museum has stayed with me ever since. Milton and Catherine had booked passage on the maiden voyage of the Titanic in 1912 and even put down a deposit, but a business matter forced them to cancel at the last minute and sail home on a different ship. The museum displays a copy of that deposit check. It is something to think about how differently things might have turned out if that one conflict had not come up when it did - both for the chocolate world and for the orphans.
Build-Your-Own Candy Bar
Back at Chocolate World, the create-your-own candy bar experience was a real highlight of that first trip. we got to design our own candy bars from start to finish, picking the ingredients and watching it get mixed, molded, and wrapped in our custom designed wrapper. Our son was thrilled with the results. If you are traveling with children, I would put this near the top of your list.
The Hotel Hershey
We also had a meal at The Hotel Hershey on that first visit, and the food was every bit as grand as the hotel itself. We talked about driving back up for dinner there again on our second night this time, but in the end we did not want to make the trip all the way back into Hershey from the campground. Our KOA carries the Hershey name, but it actually sits over in Elizabethtown, a hefty drive to the hotel, and after a full day we were happy to stay c
loser to home base.
A Few More Hershey Options Worth Knowing
We did not get to these attractions, but they are worth putting on your radar if you are planning your own Hershey stop.
- ZooAmerica is an eleven-acre, year-round walk-through zoo of North American wildlife next to Hersheypark, with entry included on a Hersheypark ticket or available separately at its own entrance.
- Hershey Gardens covers twenty-three acres of gardens and includes an indoor Butterfly Atrium with hundreds of butterflies, which makes it both a good rainy-day option and a great spot for photographs.
- The Spa at The Hotel Hershey is known for its chocolate-themed treatments, if you are looking to be pampered.
- The Falconry Experience at The Hotel Hershey lets you watch hawks, falcons, and a golden eagle in action, with a chance to have one land on your gloved hand.
- Hershey Trolley Works runs a narrated trolley tour through town that covers the Milton Hershey story and hands out chocolate along the way.
