I've Got the Golden Ticket

As a smart, cultured, and engaged young American student with the UK and the whole of Europe at your finger-tips what would you do with your first free weekend?

Punting on the Thames?
Strolling along the Seine in Paris?
Attending an opera in Vienna?

or...visiting the largest chocolate factory in the UK?!

Yeah, that's what we decided we wanted to do too....and let me tell you, Charlie was basically the luckiest kid in the world.


Last Saturday the Colgate kids hopped on a Megabus at about 8:45am headed for Birmingham, England just outside of which is Bourneville, the home of Cadbury World 'where chocolate comes to life.' The morning of our day trip was partially taken up by the 3 hr bus ride to Birmingham, but we arrived with plenty of time before our 2:50pm tour of the factory and decided to bop around Birmingham which boasts the largest outdoor marketplace in the UK. There were stalls galore filled with fresh produce, sweets, secondhand clothes, wigs, household necessities, anything you could ever possibly want could probably be found at the Bull Ring Market in Birmingham.

Then we made our way by train to the village of Bourneville which was created solely to house the Cadbury factory and its workers.






Cadbury was my kind of place...first thing that happens when you start the tour you ask? Why, yes, they do hand you two full size chocolate bars. Amen. Later on in the tour they hand you another full size chocolate bar and then as a reward for surviving the painfully creepy Cadbury world ride (basically like Mr. Toad's Wild Ride at Disneyland except that there are lots of little cocoa beans everywhere including ones in nests in trees which look like hanging skulls), they give you a cup full of melted chocolate. Then if you aren't yet in a sugar coma there is the Essence portion of the tour in which you get an even large cup filled with your choice of ingredients and more melted chocolate.

All in all, definitely worth the price of admission.