Laura Herr Photography: Hershey Park

In case you were wondering...

I haven't posted for the past few days, because we spent the weekend at Hershey Park with a group of kids from our youth group.

We stayed in tents at the Hershey Park Campground... and it reminded me that while we are really not tent camping people, a few nights in a tent can be kind of fun. That is, if you view sleeping on the ground in a nylon cave with bugs as something that's fun. My kids thought that it was extremely fun. I'm still on the fence...

If you haven't heard of it, Hershey Park is a wonderful place. It's a chocolate-themed family friendly amusement park in Pennsylvania. There are rides and fun activities for all ages. And there are giant candy themed characters that walk around and will let you take pictures with them. I don't know that it gets much better than that.

Blast from the Past... check out this photo of Christian when we went to Hershey in 2006. He wasn't too excited about the Candy characters then... thankfully, they've grown on him.

This year, we let C hang out with some friends from our youth group. He had such a great time with them, and it just reminded me how blessed we are to have kids that love our kids.

Ellee hung out with Mom and Dad.

And we were all so excited when we found what we thought was a fun train-themed ride. I assumed that it was one of those slower trains that winds throughout the park. I should have known better when the ride was equipped with a heavy lap bar, designed to keep you from flying out obviously.

We enjoyed the ride, but Ellee's post ride face summed up her experience.

Thankfully the park had plenty of rides that were more on her preferred pace.

Contrary to this silly face, she loved the carousel.

In the afternoon, we walked over to Chocolate World, an air conditioned haven complete with the World's Largest Hershey Bar. We didn't buy one, but did enjoy some delicious chocolatey treats.

Throughout the day, we caught up with groups of our youth group kids.

Thankfully, they all had a great time, and stayed well hydrated throughout the heat of the day.

One of the highlights of my day was getting to catch up with this amazing girl. In high school, we spent our summers working at a Christian summer camp in Michigan together. Those were some memorable years. She spends her time traveling the world these days (literally) and happened to be in Hershey on the day that we were there. She randomly saw Jeremy, and thought to herself that he looked like a youth pastor. She then realized that he looked like my husband (thank you facebook for keeping us all up to date on each other's lives :), walked up and introduced herself. Jeremy found me, and let me know that she was in the park and we were able to reconnect later that day. I was so incredibly happy to see her again, after all these years, and even more happy to know that God is using her to do amazing things.