Cadbury World

Our friends the Gilberts invited us to come along to Cadbury World with them on Valentine's Day.  A day centered around chocolate?  Count us in!!  We made a tour reservation and gave ourselves a little over an hour to get there... no problem with our handy dandy GPS!

So they start the tour just as you could hope... with free chocolate.  They handed us each two different bars right at the beginning, and by the end I think we had collected 5 each.  I can't believe we still bought some!  LOL  Tourists.

The tour starts with a recreation of the places that cacoa is grown, and the travels it takes to get to Europe.  A bit of the history of chocolate, then some history of the Cadbury company.  Cambria liked the rainforest exhibit.

Meridian and Kayleigh read about the origins of chocolate

 The girls point to a favorite bar

We toured through where they wrap the bars and package them in boxes for shipping. We weren't supposed to take pictures in there, but it was neat to see the chocolate bars fly through the wrapping machine! 

The girls were all a little freaked out by the moving statue guy, but they gamely posed with him anyway.  :)

Writing our names in chocolate!

They had an advertising section, showing how chocolate has been marketed over time.  Funny stuff.

They had a neat interactive digital playroom, one of the coolest things involved shadow play on a big screen.  There was a shadow ball, and you could move it around with your shadow - very cool.  This was also cool:

Make yourself in chocolate!  You could buy it as a picture, but not as actual chocolate.  :)

The chocolate sculptures went by on a conveyor belt... Cambria with her arms up on the left, then Brad & Maggie, then Meridian and Kayleigh.  

Me and the girls outside, near a big playground, on the way to the other parts of the tour.

Kayleigh was so sweet, she brought Valentine's Day gifts for the girls!  Meridian's included sunglasses that matched hers - super cute!

At the end of the Essence part of the tour, we were able to choose any combination of candies, nuts, and cereals to put in a cup, which they then covered in liquid chocolate.  I asked the guy to repeat the choices, but a lot of it was British candies that I didn't recognize the names of... rice crispies and marshmallows were the most popular choices in our group!  Yum!

So many choices!!

One more thing we learned... the factory is in the village of Bournville, which sprang up for workers to live in.  The Cadburys were Quakers, and they didn't drink... so they took great pleasure in chocolate.  Bournville still doesn't have any pubs.  Poor Bournville.  The Cadburys also were social reformers, in that they paid a decent wage and were concerned with the health and safety of their employees in a time when many other companies were not. 

A fun day, partly due to the chocolate overload, and largely due to the company!