Take a moment to imagine you are in New Orleans, Philadelphia, Florence Italy or Madrid Spain.  What do you think about?  Oysters Rockefeller?  Cheese Steaks?  Gelato?  Serrano Ham?

Food is directly associated with our travel experiences.  It helps us experience local cultures and in our own lives it’s how we pass down family traditions.

But with all travel it too quickly comes to an end and we are back to our daily routines. However, there is a way we can take ourselves back to that memorable location.  Maybe it’s a week or month later and you are reminiscing about sitting in a cafe, hiking a trail or lounging on the beach.  Here is one way to re-experience your vacation and something that can be turned into a fun game with friends or colleagues at work.

Commit $20 on your trip and pick the broadest selection of candies you can find.  Be adventurous.  If you can’t read the label or something looks different than your regular Hersey’s bar, buy it.  Candy and chocolate has a long shelf life so you can set up this activity up a couple months after your return (but good luck waiting that long.)

After a recent trip to Iceland, I decided to rank the chocolate bars of the country with my coworkers.  By no means is this an exhaustive list of chocolates but it was a delicious and fun activity.

The group’s top 3 were where the chocolate with caramel, milk chocolate with toffee and sea salt and plain milk chocolate.  

Icelanders love adding black licorice to chocolate but those didn’t make the top tier. Since I am writing the article, I am unilaterally giving an honorable mention to Lakkris Kokostomp bar because it had chocolate, licorice and some type of green taffy thing.  It was chewy, quite pleasant and I would get it again.

Honorable Mentions:

This 70% dark chocolate bar was delicious and also was toward the top of the list.

A lot of the remaining candy bars were enjoyed and I think allowed people to experience some new flavors.  However, black licorice in general and especially salty black licorices take some getting use to.