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Wednesday, April 7, 2010

Did Someone Say CHOCOLATE?????

Today our meetings brought us out to Hershey, PA! Good old CHOCOLATE WORLD! Penn State Milton Hershey Medical Center -- its HUGE! They have like 50 ORs, its just a massive place!

Hershey is a very interesting place. Its definitely its own community. Once again - my pictures are all time past so I need to go back if you really want to see Hershey pictures. Simply everything in Hershey is centered around chocolate. The names of streets -- Cocoa Lane, Caramel Blvd, Chocolate Street, etc. The restaurants -- balsamic vinegar and chocolate salad dressing, cocoa dusted diver scallops, etc.... (seriously -- these are actual dishes and they sound totally weird but they're AMAZING!).

The really cool thing is that when Hershey started a long time ago, they kind of tried to keep everything in the area. All the milk, etc that they needed for their factory. Its all a family business. So now when you drive around, everything is Hershey, and its not all corporate, a lot of it is still various family members. This is one of the large dairies down the road from the factory.


Anyways, after Hershey, we had to drive over to Lebanon for another quick meeting. So, usually, around Hershey, it seriously smells like chocolate. Well, driving out to Lebanon -- it was RANK! It smelled like pooping, dying cows that were swimming in heated stagnant water that was actually houses the dead carcasses of animals that had been dead for months. Lauren and I were both seriously puking in our mouths. We were grabbing anything we could to stick under our noses so that we'd smell something else. I wound up with a bottle of nail polish which freaked Lauren out because she thought I was going to get high. I didn't -and it did mask the smell.


The meeting we had was at the VA hospital in Lebanon, PA. Whats in Lebanon? NOTHING! Absolutely NOTHING! Which is amazing, because this is serisouly the most beautiful VA that I've ever been to. Its not gorgeous inside, but the building, as you can see, is pretty amazing. Unfortunately, VAs are the last thing that has money spent on them. They're usually some of the scariest places you can visit. Not only all the vets with issues and all the scary people that you see roaming the halls (nothing against vets, but the hospitals have really really sick ones that are there), but most everything is completely outdated and falling apart and, not really dirty, but definitely falling apart. It really really is sad. BUT - this renewed my faith a little as they were doing some construction and trying to put some new additions on and the building itself was just so pretty.
We had been complaining about Lebanon being out in the middle of nowhere and that we'd have no place to eat because there was nothing there and right on the way there, we saw this sign for a new restaurant called the BlueBird Inn. It looked really cute so we stopped on the way home for some lunch. AMAZING! The old Inn was built in 1859 and it was brand new redone so it even smelled new and was just really gorgeous. The food was out of this world! We had this grab and artichoke dip and it was delish! I also had a crab bisque that was amazing!!!!! We left so full!

The drive back to Philly takes about 2 hours so we hit the road and got back in time to get some office time in. I had a ton of flights to book as I've got a busy two weeks coming up. Stay tuned for the further travels of the "Crazy Consultant"!


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