Trippin’ Around North America

The Amish, Gettysburg and Ryans'...a full day indeed!

October 22

Good weather and an early start to the day. Soon we were in dairy farm country. The landscape is littered with silos and barns, the property must be deep in length because the farms are every few hundred meters in width. Possibly divided amongst families over the years.

In the county and city of Lancaster is the apparent centre of Amish Country. We navigated to an Amish Farm Museum, where we took the tour of the home and then wandered the yards. Our guide was very good explaining in detail the basics of present day Amish life. In particular explaining how they manage in today's modern world without violating their religious beliefs. Do you know they can's use zippers?






The community is still reeling from the recent tragic shootings in the area.

After that we zipped down the road to Gettysburg. The town/city is an absolutely wonderful place to visit. Full of well kept buildings of mixed eras, some back to the civil war era. It seems strange to see the side of a building with pockmarks from a battle that took place over 140 odd years ago.

We went to the National Parks Information Centre and took the two hour Battlefield Bus Tour. Our guide was very enthusiastic. Obviously a Yankee, as he used the "we" word frequently. His exuberance made the tour seem as if the battle was actually unfolding as we toured the various battle sites. [The battle was a three-day event, involving about 60,000 men.]

The National Parks is doing a tremendous job in restoring the 20 odd square mile park back to it's original condition. Houses, motels, trees and other non-battle era additions have been removed. The actual fences as they were are being reconstructed. There are over 3000 monuments, statues and plaques that are in the park. By far most were put up by the survivors of the military units after the war, sometimes many, many years after the war.







We still had an hour or so left in the day so we headed out again, to Maryland for the night, closer down south to Atlanta.

We arrived a bit late in the day so we whipped into town for a treat out, a store-bought dinner.
After getting lost in the dark countryside for ten minutes we arrived at the destination as instructed by our camp host. The Chinese Restaurant we sighted was soon encompassed by four fire trucks so that was out, really.

We passed by MacDonalds and Wendys in favour of Ryans, which we thought looked and sounded like a steakhouse. Not to be. Ryans is an all-you-can-eat buffet. We stalled for a few seconds and then said, "we can handle this, we musn't get stuck in a rut. "Sometimes ruts are good. It almost seems to be a contest in there, who can eat the most! The place was packed, soon we were seated and warm sweet sticky buns and sweet iced tea was in front of us. I must confess that even we ate more than we normally/should have.

If anybody is to blame for the overweight population in North America is the food merchandisers who have found a way to make money by offering too much food at modest prices. The cost of this food contest was $9.60 each, kids are $6.00 something. The family of six that was behind us left the table and floor with enough food and debris on it to feed a hungry adult.

Pictures: Half Amish, half Gettysburg.

posted by Doug and Fellette @ 9:52 AM