A little code snippet to let you remove HTML from any string in Ruby:
[source:ruby]
class String

# remove all HTML tags from the source string
def strip_html
self.gsub(/< \/?[^>]*>/, "")
end

end
[/source]
Then to run the code just do this:
[source:ruby]
blurb_html = "

Thanks for visiting our site.

"
blurb_text = blurb_html.strip_html
[/source]