Hershey, Pennsylvania, to Easton, Pennsylvania

Did we hit all the kid-friendly factory-esque stops or what?!? The day after Hershey, we nuked some oatmeal, packed up the car, hopped in, and drove straight to Crayola Experience:

crosswalk between the parking garage and Crayola Experience

Admission is VERY expensive (thank goodness for coupons!), but to be fair, you do come home with bags full of stuff at the end, all included in the cost, including crayons in custom-designed wrappers--




--and markers that you can watch being made, complete with your choice of color combination:


There's a factory show during which you can watch a demonstration of crayons being made (including receiving one of the crayons at the end!), but everything else is hands-on:

You can paint with melted crayons--


--including your finger tips, if you're that brave, I suppose:

You can draw with glowing markers in a dark room:

You can make spin art with more melted crayons in a complicated (and often broken, a docent admitted to me) wax melting and paper plate spinning machine:

Figuring out how to recreate this project is a new obsession of mine.

You can paint in a sunny spot--




--and,  in case you're worried that you'll have to carry around a wet painting all day, you can send it through the dryer:

You can make various craft projects (a puzzle and a treasure box, on the day that we were there):

You can make yourself into a coloring page--




--and color it to make yourself look funny--


--or your sister:

I'm framing this picture that Sydney colored of Willow. 

I'm probably not framing this one of Sydney that Willow colored.

You can decorate sculptures with dry erase markers:

And if you've got any leftover tokens, you can exchange them for Model Magic:

I splurged on a couple of more complicated kits for the girls to put together at my friend's place later.

Thank goodness that the Crayola Experience also had tons of active, gross motor activities, too. I possibly have two of the more crafts-oriented kids on the planet, but I doubt that they could sit around for a full day doing nothing but art activities. Now, a couple of art activities, a visit to the two-storey indoor playground--

--a couple of art activities, a trip outdoors for a picnic lunch and a good climb all over the crayon statues, a couple of art activities, an art activity that also involves running around and playing with your art--

--a couple of art activities, some time messing around with some big, open-ended manipulatives--

--a couple of art activities, a while goofing around on the interactive floor--

(we stayed in this room for a LONG time, until Willow could predict the cycling of each of the different programs, and could master each one)

--a couple of final art activities, a trip to the gift shop, where Sydney bought a Tinkerbell coloring book and I bought Twistables, Model Magic, and purple bubbles, a trip to the bathroom, and a walk to the car, where I got the girls settled, made sandwiches and passed out fruit and strawberry milk and granola bars, called my friend to get his address, programmed it into the GPS, fiddled with the GPS for an excruciatingly long time until I could make it route me around New York City, discovered that I couldn't find my planner, looked for my planner, called Matt to ask if he could call our last hotels and ask about the planner, and then finally remembered that the garage had one of those walk-up kiosks to pay for your parking, which it had probably been at least twenty minutes since I had visited, and if I didn't book it they'd probably make me pay even more to get out of the place.

Next stop: New Haven, and the Yale Peabody Museum!