Kim and I usually do a little weekend away for our birthdays but my sister and Chris had come to stay with us over my birthday so we delayed mine a little bit and went after they had gone home. I had joked a while back that I wanted to go to Intercourse, Pennsylvania because I thought the name was funny. But then I thought meh… why not? And we actually did go. We discovered it was a vacation hot spot for the elderly and stayed in a nice hotel full of old lady coach parties which I enjoyed immensely.
The next morning we got up fairly early for breakfast before a nice couples massage Kimmy had kindly bought for us and I spotted my first Amish sighting! I am strangely obsessed with the Amish so the whole weekend mainly consisted of me trying to stare inconspicuously at others. I’m nice like that. I’m not entirely convinced these people were Amish though because the hotel had a whole lot of electricity but as we discovered there are a lot of loopholes to Amish using electricity. My Dad thinks the rules are made up to benefit older men and control women and children…. go feminist Dad!
After our breakfast and our lovely massage we went for a drive about Intercourse and the surrounding area (all with imaginative names like Blue Ball, Fertility, Bird in Hand etc). There were lots of Amish and Mennonite homes but also lots of regular people they live along side that don’t follow the same rules. The Amish call non-Amish people ‘English’… even though they’re Americans not English but the Amish people speak mainly Pennsylvania Dutch… which is in fact German and not Dutch. Confused?
We went to a recreated Amish village that had lots of handmade crafts that I found charming. I found myself wondering if I might need an embroidered apron or a faceless doll but instead we settled on a magnet.
Then we went on an Amish tourist bus tour, which I imagined the Amish must hate but I couldn’t resist, although as we drove around the tour guide was neighbours to a lot of the farms and the kids waved at the bus so hopefully that meant they didn’t mind too much. This tour guide knew everything about the Amish and told us about schools, families, history, weddings, funerals, church, clothes, farms, horse and buggies, health, inheritance… everything and anything. We stopped at an Amish business that relies on tourists and bought a delicious pretzel and a shoo-fly pie (which is a bit like treacle tart) for Kim’s Mom.
We drove past a couple of tiny one room school houses and a factory that makes the buggies the Amish drive (by hand of course!). We fed this little chap.
And had an all round lovely time. Then we wandered around the recreated Amish Village which allowed us to be nosy without annoying everyone.
A whole family fits into one buggy.
But look how big it is inside!
That evening we thought we’d avoid the normal chains to eat at and try somewhere local, the problem was that all of the Amish restaurants closed at 7pm (??) on a Saturday (Saturday night is date night for the Amish teens). So we settled on a place called Shady Maple Smorgasbord along with all the other elderly folk. It was immense, the website says that the main dining area can seat 1,200 people and there were literally hundreds of people wandering around with plates. I wouldn’t be surprised if some of them had been left behind by their coach parties years ago and they just live there now.
The thing was, the buffet was so large that it wasn’t even crowded. There was food everywhere, and not just any food, old fashioned home cooked style food. My Uncle married a very nice lady originally from the Philippines and before she met my great auntie Lily (who is 90 this year) my Uncle told my Great Aunt what an excellent cook his new wife Lynn was. “I won’t eat rice Jim!” said my Great Aunt to my bewildered Uncle who had to spend the next 5 minutes convincing my Great Aunt that Lynn wouldn’t try to force her to eat rice. This restaurant would be an excellent place to take people like my Great Aunt.
Also, ‘I won’t eat rice Jim!’ is now a catch phrase at our house.
Luckily we found our way back to our table through the sea of people and we got to try some shoo-fly pie.
I took this photo for my friend Sarah, yes it is a toilet, but Sarah and I have this theory that old people love the colour beige. Old people love beige shoes, beige coats, even beige cars – and at this, the edifice of the elderly, the toilets were even beige. Fantastic.
What more could you want at a giant buffet?
A 44,000 sq ft gift shop of course, yes, that is over an acre. An acre of tat. I loved every minute of it.
After that we had a little swim back in the hotel before escaping what seemed to be an entire hockey team of teenagers on tour who ended every sentence in “Bro” or “Man” or the big one… “Duuuuude”.
And that was the end of our lovely weekend, we got home and got a nice Christmas tree from our local garden store Cropleys and put all our decorations up, including a new one we got in Amish Country.
hayleyiraina 