See, the problem with taking frequent family road trips is that it gets to be a part of you, and you end up needing to hit the road as frequently as possible. We didn’t travel anywhere this month. It’s killing me.

However, staying put gave me the opportunity to plan out our next several adventures. Travel planning is almost as fun as the travel itself; without all the back seat fight refereeing. (“Stop singing in your brother’s ear. Let your sister pick the DVD. Give him back the pretzels. Did you just take her last sip? LET’S ALL PLAY THE QUIET GAME!!”)

In a few short weeks, the Go BIG family is wheels up! Here’s what the next few months look like:

February – Pittsburgh, PA

The world’s largest permanent robotics exhibition – “roboworld” – at the Carnegie Science Center

The world’s largest collection of Jurassic dinosaurs at the Carnegie Museum of Natural History

Credit: Joshua Franzos for Carnegie Museum of Natural History

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World's largest shoe house! (And possibly the world's ONLY shoe house.)

There was an old woman who visited a shoe. It was closed and her children didn’t know what to do.

Sorry. I’ll stop mangling nursery rhymes now.

This is the Haines Shoe House in Hellam, PA. We found it while visiting the “snack food corridor” of York, Lancaster, and Chester counties in Pennsylvania Dutch Country last month. Built in 1948, it’s 25 feet high and 48 feet long.

It’s actually a house with several interior rooms, although it’s now operating as a museum of sorts. Guided tours are offered, but unfortunately, not when we were there!

By the way, the rest of this family  getaway along the “sweet and salty trail” was really entertaining! Several snack food companies, like Snyder’s of Hanover, UTZ, Herr’s and Turkey Hill Dairy are headquartered here, and offer free public tours.

I wrote a two-part series for FamilyVacationCritic.com about our trip; check it out for more details if you’re interested in planning a trip!

Pennsylvania’s Snack Food Corridor: The Sweet Side

Pennsylvania’s Snack Food Corridor: The Salty Side

This big, beautiful bovine isn’t the world’s largest, and she doesn’t even have a name. But we still love her, because she welcomed us to the Turkey Hill Experience in Colombia, PA!

They’re not excited at ALL.

Where we went, and who was coerced into going?
Heading to Pennsylvania Dutch Country was a “last hurrah” getaway before school started. I told the kids, “we’re going to learn how ice cream and potato chips are made, and then we get to eat them.” Not a tough sell.

WHY did you go there, exactly?
The Turkey Hill Experience was the last stop on a three-day tour of the “snack food corridor” connecting York, Lancaster, and Chester counties. We toured potato chip and pretzel factories, visited chocolate makers, and searched for whoopie pies. Both York and Lancaster counties have their own “sweet and salty” tour itineraries listing all the companies offering public tours and/or outlet shopping. We visited nine of them!

Even after gorging ourselves on all that, there was still room for ice cream!

Okay, what was so cool about it?

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I hear you gasp. Yes, the photo quality is…well…not great. But it’s scanned from a 35mm print taken five years ago and unearthed from an old scrapbook, so cut me some slack.

Meet "Big Blue." the world's largest crayon

This week, my baby started middle school, so this “Photo Friday” is about The Boy and our visit to The Crayola Experience™ in 2006 to see the world’s largest crayon.

He was just a sprite back then, and The Girl wasn’t even in our realm of contemplation. (Two kids? Crazy talk!)

When we were three.

The Crayola Experience in Easton, PA is not the real crayon manufacturing plant. It’s more like a children’s activity and discovery center, with plenty of hands-on activities. The world’s largest crayon is actually in the gift shop.  Fifteen feet long and 16 inches in circumference, “Big Blue” was created in 2003 to reflect America’s favorite color. It weighs 1,500 lbs, and is the equivalent of 123,000 blue crayons.

The gift shop, by the way, is awesome! I remember it the most, mainly because it offered such an extensive range of Crayola products you just can’t find in the stores. “Santa” had a field day stocking up in advance of Christmas that year!

It should be noted that we were in PA last week, and I floated the idea of returning to the Crayola Experience to get an updated photo. The Boy, now 11, wanted none of it. Sigh. He’s actually starting to outgrow certain travel destinations and attractions. I guess Sesame Place is also out!

See Photo Friday posts from other bloggers on DeliciousBaby.com.

We’re headed to Pennsylvania this weekend for one last getaway before school starts next week. As giddy as I am for the return to school days (cue angelic harp music), I’m sad that our traveling will be curtailed for the next several months. The Boy begins middle school, so it’s even tougher on him now to miss days and make up all the work.

So we’re going out with a bang and a BIG cow (or two)! The focus of our trip is the new Turkey Hill Experience in Lancaster County, an interactive, museum-ish tour that the ice cream company opened this summer. The kids will get to milk some (not real) cows, and we’ll all get to stuff our faces with ice cream.

Credit: TurkeyHillExperience.com

Speaking of face-stuffing, we’re also going to visit several other food factories in the area. York, Lancaster, and Chester counties are full of them; the area is known as the “snack food corridor.” So, Points Plus be (temporarily) damned, here’s the calorific countdown for the next several days:

Revonah Pretzel Bakery, Inc.

Snyder’s of Hanover

UTZ

Herr’s

Martin’s Chips

Wolfgang Candy

Turkey Hill Experience

Julius Sturgis Pretzel Bakery

Wilbur Chocolate Co.

Hey, on an unrelated but exciting note, have you seen us profiled on SecondAct.com? Please take a look at our Florida trip on the “My Vacation” page! Our photos of Splitsville and the Columbia Restaurant in Tampa, the Mirror Lake Shuffleboard Club in St. Pete, and the Sea Screamer speedboat in Clearwater live on in this article on our road trip over the holidays. We were thrilled to be included, despite the fact that it’s a site for “Boomers.” I guess at 41, I’m encroaching on that phase, huh?

Remember our freezefest on the world's largest speed boat?

I don’t mean to send my friends out on bad “Go BIG” assignments. It’s just coincidental that our last two gracious volunteer correspondents got stuck with duds. First, Sandra spent a small fortune on the cheesefest that is Santa’s Enchanted Forest, the world’s largest Christmas theme park. Now, Tom has submitted this report from his visit to the world’s largest candy store. This place, you will note, has been awarded the lowest score in “Go BIG” history. Even though I’m a raging chocoholic, I think even I would have scored it low.

Looks nice enough from the outside...

I appreciate Tom’s relative restraint, and the humor he found in the situation. He presents more humorous slice-of-life tales in his blog, and on his new site, Creature Banter. If you’ve ever laughed at the naïve yet absurd utterances from the children in your life, you’ll appreciate his collection.

His report:

After a post-holiday week-long trip back to my East Coast roots, we were facing a 14-hour drive to our Indiana home. Connecticut to Indiana. Just typing it makes me shutter.

“We” included me, my love Rachel and her 9-year-old daughter, who informed me prior to our excursion that “long car trips aren’t my thing.”

So we were thrilled to hear that our reward for the 300-mile trek through the state of Pennsylvania was a visit to Daffin’s, which calls itself the world’s largest candy store. The store resides in Sharon, PA, a few miles off Interstate 80. The store’s website boasted of Daffin’s Chocolate Kingdom – including chocolate villages and a 400-pound chocolate turtle.  This was not to be missed.

So we were excited to bribe the child with candy, and what would surely be a visit to paradise.

The location was a bit hard to find, as its location was a few miles from the highway, but we were determined to find it, and indulge in some chocolate and candy.

We finally arrived…or did we? Is this the place? Or is this a pharmacy?

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December 26, 2010

Can we get back in the warm car now?!

It was an Armageddon-like scene: packing the car with clothing and food, setting out in the dark of night, and racing against time to get out of state. We were escaping the blizzard, of course, which would have put an end to our Go BIG or Go Home road trip to FL.

We made it out just in time, as the northeast got socked in. Our miserly (cheap) decision to drive to FL rather than drive worked to our advantage, as the airports closed or canceled the flights we would have been taking.

Keeping it interesting was the snowfall in the south, which is both a novelty for the locals and an emergency situation, as roads become treacherous from lack of plows and lack of seasoned winter drivers.

We're not even getting out of the car this time...

Used to much worse, we shrugged our shoulders at the dusting. With front wheel drive, we looked quizzically at the cars which spun off the roads. And we were just plain irritated upon finding out that the Cracker Barrel in Jonesville, NC wouldn’t be open for dinner because the employees couldn’t make it in for work due to the two inches of snow. Matt’s mouth was set for chicken-fried…something.

Despite the surreal weather situations bringing down the worlds around us, we managed to see three BIG attractions on Day 1 of the Go BIG or Go Home Road Trip:

The huge Benjamin Moore paint can in Shippensburg, PA; a huge storage tank pained blue, standing in front of a paint store. It’s IMMENSE. There’s not much more to look at or do there, so we stopped, jumped out and took the photos. It was fuh-reezing that morning, so a quick stop was all we were willing to tolerate anyway. Even The Girl, who will brave freezing temps to play in the playground, yelled “yee-OWW,” and jumped back in the car asap.

World's Largest Apple!

We were all so disenchanted with the weather that Matt was the only one willing to exit the car to get a photo of the large Coke bottle in Hagerstown, MD, which is perched on the roof of a bottling company a minute from I-81. I don’t think the kids even looked up from watching Bolt on the DVD player.

We had to drive off the highway several miles to see the world’s largest apple in Winchester, VA. It’s in front of an upscale gift shop which called my name so loudly I almost succumbed. (“Christmas décor, 50% off.”) Again, we were too cold to linger, so we took a few photos and drove around the town to enjoy the historic architecture.

Then we began to notice more large apples in front of other businesses, painted in different themes. We discovered three more, plus the world’s largest apple storage facility. Call it a hunch, but I think the town has a history as an apple producer.

Love the fine print on this sign. Classic "C.Y.A."

COMING SOON!

Teaser: I’ll try to minimize the ooze of sentimentality, but this was “The Site Which Started Our Go BIG Journey.” It’s a15-foot, 1,500-lb. crayon named “Big Blue,” which sits in the Crayola Factory Store. I dare you not to buy anything in this place.