Big Pennsylvania Weekend

Last weekend my husband, daughter, and I took a trip to Hershey, PA to meet my in-laws and sister-in-law for a fun chocolate-filled weekend. If you want to see an image larger, just click on it - since there's so many, I wanted to keep them relatively small.

First up, the chocolate tour!

Something I thought was super cute, they let the kids "work" in the kisses factory. They get a special paper hat and have their official employee picture taken.

Of course, we attended the Tasting Adventure at Hershey U.

That was all on Saturday. On Sunday, before we parted ways and headed for home, we decided to go to ZooAmerica: North American Wildlife Park. It definitely felt smaller to us than the website makes it look and we were in and out in under a couple of hours, but it was still a nice zoo that I would recommend if you're in the area. Not to mention, some of my absolute favorite things to photograph are the animals at zoos and aquariums. For those interested - I had my Canon 100mm Macro on the Mark II and my Tamron 17-50mm on the Rebel (faithfully manned by my awesome sister-in-law!) All photos below with the first combination.

I share these next two with you because I had to manually focus in almost pitch black darkness while hand-holding a heavy camera/lens combination, and was really impressed with how they came out.

I always find the friendliest fish ;)

Awesome Birds of Prey:

Lastly, we enjoyed a quick stop in Gettysburg on our way home. My husband (a huge history buff) and I used to love coming to Gettysburg for a day trip before we had our daughter. It's only about 90mins from our home in Virginia, about half way between us and Hershey, so it was a great place to stop and stretch our legs. This is my favorite monument, the 69th Irish Brigade.