Friday, September 19, 2008

September 19, 2008 – Mercer, PA

We traveled thru Ohio today and stopped about 30 or 40 miles into Pennsylvania. The first 2/3 or so of Ohio looked about like Illinois, - fairly flat and lots of corn and soy bean fields. By the way, their crops are ahead of the ones in our area, they were combining beans in a couple of places. I guess they didn’t have the extremely wet spring like we had. In fact some of their streams and lakes looked a little low. The latter part of Ohio was somewhat hilly.

We had called this campground yesterday, but were told they were without electricity, as was most of the area after the storm from hurricane Ike. We never saw any damage anywhere, but the news people on the radio always mentioned the power outages. We called the campground before we got here and asked again and they said power had been restored today. We pulled into the campground about 3:00. They had a sign about a free Amish tour, so we asked about it. After we got set up, Larry went back and they gave him 4 or 5 laminated pages to follow the route thru the Amish country. We followed the route (or at least tried to follow it) thru most of the tour. A few places led us to dead ends before I read further down to where it said the road would be a dead end and we would have to retrace our path. It was really interesting, and we met or passed several horse and buggy sets on the tour. One highlight mentioned was an Amish school house. It was a one room schoolhouse, outside were outhouses, a hand pump for water and a shed for the teacher’s horse. Most of the tour, there would be Amish homes and farms with horses and buggies and next to it would be an “English” home or farm, with cars and trucks outside. At one point, it said to look up at a certain intersection, because this would be the last we would see electric lines for several miles coming up. So in that area, all the farms were Amish. One man was mowing his lawn, by riding on two rotary mowers pulled by a horse. Larry says that was the Amish version of a garden tractor. We would have liked to have had a picture of that, but we know they don’t like to have their pictures taken, so we didn’t try. We did take a few pictures of some of the farms where they had cut their corn and tied it into shocks – I guess that’s what it’s called tied into bundles and left standing in the field.

Larry thought I got him lost a few times on this tour, so he said Greta (our GPS) doesn’t need to worry about losing her job! As a bonus, we stopped at an Amish roadside stand and bought some cinnamon rolls from them. Yumm!

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