I started out this morning with a tour of the Hammond's Candy Factory. I forgot to take a picture of the building, and we weren't allowed to take pictures inside, so oops. I got there just before the 9:30 tour. There were 3 of us on the tour. All of Hammond's Candies are handmade at this one factory and they ship all over the world. It's amazing how much they're able to make by hand. They make a TON of various types of candy canes as well as ribbons and lollipops and other assorted sugar based candies. They also make chocolates and truffles. We saw 2 rooms - the cook room and the packaging room. In the cook room, it is always quite warm, about 85-90 degrees all the time. They make a batch of candy in a copper pot and heat it up to 324 degrees. Then they pour it onto a tray and add color and flavoring. They may put it on the pulling machine in order to modify the color if necessary. Then they mold the various colors into a block and it goes over to the twisting station. There, a pair of people will twist, cut, and form the candy into its shape. The candy then proceeds into the packaging room.
The packaging room is much cooler - around 66 degrees. In this room, the candies are individually packaged and sealed by hand. The appropriate stickers are applied to each candy and then the candies are packaged into shipping containers. They work on getting ready for the Christmas season all year round. There were no chocolates being made while I was there. Everything I saw was incredibly interesting. I had a ton of questions about process and forecasting. Also, the tour was free! You can't beat that. Although I did end up buying $20 worth of chocolates afterwards.
I was at the candy factory for about an hour, and then I drove downtown for the capitol volksmarch. This was a really good walk. It started with a loop through the Auraria campus.
Then it went over to Centennial and Confluence Parks. That area reminded me a lot of the Town Lake trail. Lots of trails around the river with a lot of joggers and cyclists. Biggest difference is that the whole path here was paved.
I stopped for lunch at My Brother's Bar and had a jalapeno cream cheese burger with fries and onion rings. Super tasty!!! The hefeweizen helped too. From there, the walk took me over Millennium Bridge:
Where I saw one of my favorite signs ever:
From there, it was up to Coors field, where I was super excited to take a tour. We got to see suites, the press box, the press club, the club level, the visiting clubhouse, and go out to field level through the umpires' tunnel. We weren't allowed on the grass, but we were allowed to go into the dugout and everything. It was amazing!!!! I got so excited to see the visitors' clubhouse especially - knowing that that's where my Phillies are when they're in town.
After the Coors Field tour, I continued on the rest of the Volksmarch, which essentially consisted of getting over to the Capitol building. Once again, I didn't get to take a tour of the Capitol (last tour was at 3:00 and I didn't get there until about 4:30), but I walked around and took a bunch of pictures.
After finishing up the walk (which claimed to be 11km, but according to my calculations was more like 12.5km), I drove over to Michelle's work and met her and her boyfriend there. The three of us went out to dinner, drove back to her house, and walked over for ice cream at Dairy Queen. A really really great day.
Tomorrow, I'm driving to the west of Denver, hitting up a few wineries in Clifton and Palisade and spending the night in Grand junction. It should be a pretty easy day.
No comments:
Post a Comment