"I scream, you scream, we all scream for ice cream..... AAAAH!"
I am a huge ice cream fan; I love it all, cheap ice cream, gourmet ice cream, fruity ice cream... you name it I love it, except for chocolate. Yuck! When my family and I got the opportunity to go to the Turkey Hill Ice Cream experience, we literally screamed for ice cream! The Turkey Hill ice cream experience is a sure fire half day of fun located in Columbia, PA and is an easy day trip to add to your Hershey, PA vacation or on the way to NYC.
Tickets are not very expensive and best of all, past and present military personnel get in free. Regular admission tickets are right at $10 per person with an additional $5.45 to the Taste Lab experience, which is the best part. Tickets and reservations need to be made online as well because the Taste Lab sells out quickly, and for good reason.
The experience is not set in a working factory. They don't make ice cream there but
there are tons of interactive exhibits and stations that tells you all about Turkey Hill and the science of making their delicious ice cream. The experience allowed my girls to milk mechanical cows( which they enjoyed a lot more than I thought they would) develop their own virtual flavors and star in their very own Turkey Hill TV commercial. There were unlimited Turkey Hill ice cream samples and they even had a tea room where you can taste Turkey Hill teas and other beverages. My kids really took advantage of the free samples of ice cream while my husband and I sat in rocking chairs and happily indulged as well.
We reserved tickets to do the tasting lab, wanting to get the full experience and had no real idea what to expect when we purchased tickets. Initially, I thought it would be an exclusive taste test but instead I was please to discover that stepping into the tasting lab we became real ice cream scientist! Using extracts, flavorings, mix ins etc... we got to develop a pint of our very own ice cream starting with a vanilla or chocolate base. The workers are there to help you along the way to tell you how many drops of extract or what things paired together don't taste as good as you imagine. Because in my head I'm a gourmet ice cream chef, I didn't listen and created an amazing concoction that I call chercocopine surprise! It was so good with a coconut extract base, a couple drops of pineapple extract, cherry syrup and freeze dried pineapples. Yummy! They told us never to mix 2 extracts... oh well, I thought I was a word class ice cream chef! I could sell it, mine was so good. I'd buy it, anyway... My family all had concoctions of their own that they were happy with as well. The tasting lab proved to be one of the most fun things we did the entire summer.
One piece of advice, do not go balls to the wall on free ice cream samples only to realize that you must finish your whole pint of hand crafted chercocopine surprise or let it melt. Needless to say, belly aches were in full affect. It was too good to let melt! We were officially ice cream wasted and the drive home was miserable! LOL! Guess what, I'd probably do it all over again too!
What are you waiting for? I couldn't think of any place better to get ice cream wasted than the Turkey Hill Experience!
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