When we left Gettysburg, PA we headed for Lancaster and some
of the Amish towns that we enjoyed visiting in the past.
We needed to be close to Reading later that
afternoon so it was a quick trip.
We
stopped first at Intercourse and went through some of the shops, in particular,
the Stoltzfus Meat Market that has a wide selection of bulk and fresh foods and
lots of samples of meats, cheeses, peanut butter and many different fruit
jellies.
We found something new to
us—chocolate peanut butter and bought a ¼ lb.tub—it's delicious!
We also sampled a bunch of different cheeses and
especially liked their Swiss and Rye cheese and bought a piece that we're really
enjoying!
Across the street, the Intercourse Cannery store had many
other very tasty samples of their foods, but nothing that we really wanted,
especially with our very small refrigerator space.
We saw a few more Amish buggies come down
the street along with a much larger buggy for a commercial tour company—an
excursion buggy!
One store had a display
of custom made copper roof cupolas that were very ornate with a shiny copper
finish!
Amazing that the town of
Intercourse was founded in 1754!
 |
| Very creative windows of one store--the paintings look so real! |
We also visited Blue Ball but nothing there attracted our
attention and the traffic was very heavy.
Next was the town of New Holland which we had never stopped at
before.
The New Holland agricultural
machinery company has its headquarters here and a large display of equipment in
front.
We saw a new-to-us type of Amish
buggy that looked a bit like an old pickup truck since it had a pickup-type bed
behind the covered cab; probably very useful for trips to the feed store or
hardware store!
We turned into a country road and finally found some Amish
and Mennonite farms.
We were excited to
find several horse drawn plows working in the fields and stopped on the side of
the road for a while to photograph them.
Several had 4 horse teams and the last one had an amazing 8 horse
team!
Never seen that many horses on one
plow before!
It was fascinating to see
them make a turn with all the horses moving in unison!
We drove along slowly enjoying the clean,
well kept farms and beautiful old barns, silos and dairy farms too.
It was laundry day on many of the farms
obviously from the long clotheslines of clothing.
On one farm we saw a large pen with 4 Texas longhorn
cattle—that was a surprise!
Another
farm had a series of igloo-type fiberglass structures that were individual calf
houses!
They were all up a hill and I
finally found one house with the calf's head in view!
The others were on nap!
Some of the farms had big tall open mesh bins
of corn which we figured must be animal feed???
A couple of the barns we saw looked like something out of a
beautiful painting with several cupolas on top of the roof.
Some farms kept their old wooden barns
painted and in good repair and other farms let them go and some were falling
over from disuse.
The highlight of the
day had to be the horse teams plowing the fields!
It was just magical watching them pull
together so precisely and knowing just when to turn at the end of a row!
It's always pleasant to visit the Amish country, see the quilt
stores, all the delicious foods and cheeses and much more.
What we missed were the “Cheeser” pretzels
that we bought last year in several places in Indiana and even Virginia and
really enjoyed.
But many other nice
country sights made it a very pleasant drive that we'll look forward to doing
again in the future!
 |
| Typical Amish Folk Art painting we saw in a store |
 |
| These gorgeous trees were in bloom all over the place |
That evening, we had a very nice visit plus dinner with our
son and his family.
Our grandkids are
now 5 and 8 and really growing up fast.
It was sure good to spend a little time and get reacquainted!
 |
| Megan, Rick and Lin |
No comments:
Post a Comment