The Amish Country

We said good-bye to Megan and while she was returning to Washington DC, we continued our tour into the Pennsylvania countryside to Strasburg where we stayed. Strasburg is in the center of the Amish country and we had great fun looking at the beautiful Pennsylvania farmlands while watching for the horse and buggies that the Amish drive along the sides of the roads as they go about their daily business. Besides the horse drawn buggies, we also saw some very strong farm horses pulling plows as they worked the fields. And, we saw some Amish children and women who were on a vehicle that was a cross between a bicycle and a skateboard. None of us had ever seen one of these vehicles before. They had wheels and handlebars like a bicycle, a basket in front for carrying things, and a skateboard like base between the wheels which was used just like a skateboard to propel them forward.

Some of the little towns that we went through included Paradise, Bird-in-the-Hand, and Intercourse..... Intercourse captures the imagination with its name, but it actually has more to do with intersecting roads than with anything else that comes to mind!!

We took time to go through a large antique mall in Bird-in-the-Hand before we went to eat at a buffet that featured Amish and Mennonite food. The food was really good and included a really good assortment, including some wonderful pies....no one tried the ShooFly pie because there were so many other great choices, but that is a local favorite.

We passed by a gathering of some of the Amish locals and took a couple of pictures of the buggies as they were gathered together. The buggies all have a red triangle warning sign on the back of them to make them more visible to automobile drivers. It's got to be really dangerous to drive one of those buggies on the side of the country roads, including some of the highways. One thing that surprised all of us was the speed that the horse and buggies were able to reach in such a short distance once they started out. But, they still go much more slowly than the cars that are sharing the same roads with them. I kept trying to get a good picture of a horse and buggy as a family was heading down the road, but kept getting lots of shots of the back wheel or a buggy just as it passed an obstacle that blocked part of the picture.....oh, well...at least I tried....