After getting some bad news about the condition of my car from the mechanics at Midas (it needed a bunch of work on it's brakes, which, as you can guess, wasn't very cheap), I decided I needed something to cheer me up a little bit. Chocolate seems to work quite often, so I made my way over to the Cadbury Factory.

I was definitely pretty excited about this tour. I absolutely love chocolate, and have always really enjoyed eating cadbury cream eggs every easter. Apparently a lot of people really like to visit the cadbury factory, as they have tours every half hour for almost the entire day, 7 days a week!

When the tour first started, we were given hair nets to put on our heads for our entire journey through the factory. The men with beards got to look even more cool, as they had to put something over their beards as well. We were also told to take off all jewelry and watches. Then we had to put all our cameras in a locker because no cameras were allowed. I was starting to feel like this tour was going to be pretty hard core! We first watched a short video, and were given our first piece of chocolate- a marshmellow fish. Some people just pocketed them, but I of course ate mine right away. It was pretty good.

We then started going through the factory, which was overall pretty interesting. Our tour guide told us a bunch of interesting facts, most of which I don't remember anymore. It was fun though, and our tour guide did a very good job. The factory runs 24 hours, 6 days per week. They have to work on their easter products for six months in order to have enough stuff for easter time! We were told how the different kinds of chocolate were made and were shown different production areas and also where they store the finished chocolate (a huge warehouse with enough room for 7,000 pallettes of chocolate!). I wonder if anyone has ever tried to break into that warehouse... hmmm.. just a thought. Anyway..

At the end of the tour, we went into a silo, where they poured one ton of liquid chocolate into a bin. It was really cool to see, although it was all just for show. The woman said that chocolate will never get eaten by anyone; it just gets poured over and over again for the tours.

Overall, a fun way to spend just over an hour. I have to admit that I was somewhat dissapointed with the amount of chocolate we recieved. I was really ready to eat a lot of chocolate. We ended up with one marshmellow fish, two cadbury dream eggs (white chocolate eggs), two small crunchie bars (I had never heard of them, they were ok), and one moro bar (like a 3 musketeers bar). So, probably most people would think that is a descent amount of chocolate, but I am not most people. The tour was 14 dollars, so they kind of owed us some samples. I guess I am like the people who go to the brewery tours and really want to drink a ton of beer at the end, except I really wanted to eat a ton of chocolate instead.

I am now wwoofing with a very nice family in Dunedin for a few days until the Southern Traverse starts. The husband is a runner as well, so me, him, and a work friend just went for a run in the area. That was so nice, as I have not had anyone to run with for over 2 months. Sometimes it is just really good to let someone else do the leading for a run, and not have to worry all the time about whether you are going to get lost. Not that I get lost easily or anything like that...