Mentos by Susie

On Saturday, while we were camping with the Ruffs, Taylor suggested the brilliant plan of blowing up a 2-liter of Diet Coke with a package of Mentos. Everyone thought it was a great plan, and when we went to Wal-Mart later we bought Diet Coke and looked all over for Mentos. They had Mentos gum, but that wouldn't work, so we high-tailed it over to a gas station and found Mentos there. Upon our return to the campsite, we put the Diet Coke in place and got ready to do our wonderful experiment. However, when we put the Mentos in, the bottle didn't blow up like we thought it would. None of us had ever done it before, so we didn't know exactly what to expect. Instead of "blowing up", it just spewed all the Diet Coke straight in the air in a foamy fountain form. After some debate, we decided that the reason it didn't really "blow up" was because we hadn't screwed the lid on all the way. So we went down to the camp store and bought two (expensive) 20 oz. bottles of Diet Coke. We still had enough Mentos to "blow up" both of them. Back at the campsite we tried it again, this time screwing the lid on all the way. We watched the foam build up, but it didn't blow up. Then we had to unscrew the lid, and it did it again. We tried one more time with the last Diet Coke bottle with similar results. Then the dads stepped in and said they could do it better. Uncle Theron put the last 2 Mentos in a Diet Pepsi bottle. (Since it wasn't Diet Coke, everyone doubted it would work.) However, it spewed the Diet Pepsi out just fine. It was really fun, and we ended up wishing Stephen and Kevin had been there to help us make more (somewhat destructive) experiments. We're looking forward to a potato gun next year. ;-)