Gardner's Candies

When I'm on car trips with my family, we always try to find interesting places to stop for meals. Having a Garmin has been a great help with this, since there are often really interesting places just off the highway that we would never know about without the magic of Garmin's diner radar, or "dinar" as we have come to call it. Anyway, on our most recent trip, we stopped for lunch at Thelma's Cafe in Tyrone, PA, where I had "hamburg rivel" soup, which was something new to me -- it's kind of like Matzoh ball soup, I guess, with hamburger instead of chicken, and the matzoh ball kind of crumbled up. Thelma's was a nice friendly place, and right around the corner was Gardner's Candies, the retail establishment for Tyrone's candy factory. It's a real nice place, with lots of candy, as well as an ice cream parlor and a mini-museum. And while lots of small candy factories tend to make chocolate that has a "cheap" taste, Gardner's was surprisingly delicate and refined. Definitely a fun stop off of I-80!