Amish Tour

On Tuesday, we went for a walk around the Hershey Preserves before beginning another adventuresome day.  Hershey Preserves is one of the nicer Thousand Trails campgrounds we have stayed at.  The sites are well spaced apart and they have a beautiful lake in the middle of the campground.

After our walk, Ken and Bonnie drove us to where Bonnie's parents, Bill and Gloria, live at the Masonic Homes in Elizabethtown, PA, so we could meet her mom and dad and also because her mom was going to give us an Amish Tour today.

The Masonic Homes is a continuing care retirement community, children's home, and community service organization.  The community has on its campus a senior living and assisted living facility that is the nicest we have ever seen.  There are paved trails that run throughout the 1,400 acres and Bonnie's dad has traveled probably most of them on his motorized chair.  He knows more about where everything is (and how it is built) than the people working there!

 

After leaving the Masonic Homes, we began our tour of Amish country with Bonnie's mom giving us lots of information sprinkled with a lot of humor about not just of the Amish countryside but also about the town of Lancaster also.

We went by the Dove chocolate factory that is also located in Elizabethtown, PA.  We could smell the chocolate as we drove by.  Mmmmmm.  :)

As we drove through the Amish countryside, Bonnie's mom told us about the Amish people, their families, their culture, and their traditions.  We drove through their beautiful farms.

Look at the HUGE pumpkins!  

We made a stop at the Bird-in-Hand store where we had some of their delicious whoopie pies.  Oh my goodness!  They are so delicious.  There is nothing like a pumpkin whoopie pie.  :)

We continued driving through the Amish countryside and saw this Amish farmer working in the field with his mule-drawn farm equipment.

While tobacco has been replaced by corn as the main crop of the Amish, there are still farms that grow non-nicotine tobacco.  We could see tobacco hanging in some of the barns.

We stopped at Eli's farm where we tasted homemade root beer and had the best-tasting soft pretzels ever!  Oh my goodness...again!  They were soooo gooood.  After leaving Eli's, we drove to a spot on Scenic Road where Gloria asked Ken to pull off to the side of the road and just listen to the sound of the countryside.

She asked us all to just listen to the sounds of the countryside.  She spoke of how when she used to give Amish Tours, some people would pray, some would cry, schoolchildren would giggle, but others would get chill bumps...like me.  It was beautiful.  The sounds of the corn stalks rustling in the wind.  The beauty of the patchwork of fields growing different kinds of crops and at different stages of harvest.

We stopped at another Amish vegetable stand and bought some peppers and fruit before going to Dienner's Country Restaurant where we enjoyed a delicious buffet-style Amish dinner of fresh vegetables.  We enjoyed local favorites of buttered noodles, ham loaf, bread filling, and a lot of delicious vegetables.  Oh my goodness!  It was so good.

When we got back to the camper, I spread out all of our goodies we had bought today.

What a wonderful day!  Thank you, Gloria, for a wonderful tour of Amish country!  And thank you, Ken and Bonnie, for driving us around your beautiful Lancaster County.