The Great American Road Trip: Days 17 and 18 - Hammonds Candy Factory and moving around town

Thursday was a very small day for photos but a big day for adventure! After a wonderful relaxed start to the morning, I picked up Rocky and we met Caitlin at the Hammonds Candy factory for a tour. They're known for their ribbon candy and candy cane trees (they just did a huge order of the latter for Crate and Barrel, should you wish to buy one), but they also make taffy, other hard candies, and a variety of chocolates and truffles. The tour was free, short and fairly simple - just a small factory with very large windows and some overhead cameras so you could see what was going on in the back. It was really interesting to see people working on traditional machinery, using the same techniques that the founder used in the 1920s (a good deal of the machinery was custom built in the 30s and 40s and they take very good care of it because they're hard to fix!). The tour guide said that a number of people had been working there for a very long time - several started when they were in their teens, some were even second-generation in a family, or husband and wife teams. We couldn't take pictures inside the factory, but we were watching them mix the colors for their rainbow stripe taffy and then our guide managed to get us a bit of the fresh taffy rejects! The stripes weren't the correct width, but they sure were pretty tasty none the less ;) If you go, I highly recommend the five spice candy cane (if you've had Bengal Spice tea from Celestial Seasonings, it tastes a bit like that), the caramel covered marshmallows (you can get bags of caramel to take home by the pound), the s'mores chocolate bar, and all of the truffles we sampled were very well received (I had the salted dark chocolate butterscotch). Happy sweet teeth all around :D

Today I finally packed myself up out of Chuck and T's comfortable guest room and back into traveling mode with Oliver. Tonight I'm staying with Dan and Kellyn - two Burkina Peace Corps friends - and their adorable puppy Caddy. I aspire to one day have a home like this - comfortable, warm, and welcoming (and with a library of course). The homemade tofu curry and spaghetti carbonara were a nice touch as well!