Lancaster County, PA

On Thursday July 5th we drove to Lancaster county in Pennsylvania to discover the Amish and their homemade items. We went to several different Amish stores where we saw beautiful hand made quilts and furniture. We had the opportunity to visit with one Amish couple who ran a store, they both made the quilts with sewing machines that were powered by compressed air  powered by propane. The store did not have air conditioning only fans that were  powered by compressed air. When we first came in I thought I heard a horse walking on pavement and it was the over head fan. It was not unusual for us to see them in their horse and buggies. The shop owners do not live in their store and did not own a horse and buggy. They stated that although they are not allowed to own or drive a car-they can ride in them and they hire a car to bring them to/from their shop.

We rode on the Strausburg Steam Train, it was a 45 minute ride through the Amish country side, we had several choices as to where we wanted to sit. The hands down choice was the open air car.

The train that we took had one stop-I only can assume that this Amish women got off at that stop.

The train was powered by steam that was generated by coal-the smoke was really dark, so some of the pictures were blurry. The picture below is of an Amish man working in his field with horses pulling the plow.

This is an Amish school house where the children go to school from Kindergarten thru 8th grade.

Typical Amish farm

In the town of Intercourse we went on a mini tour of how pretzels are made and the pretzel I made is below. My second career is not going to be pretzel making.