Amish Country

We left DC Monday morning and arrived in Intercourse Pennsylvania. Yep, that's right...it's not a typo. We're actually in the city of Intercourse. Lancaster Pennsylvania is Amish country. Intercourse Pennsylvania is just a couple of miles from Lancaster. And there really are numerous horse and buggy's around here. Amish people are everywhere. The men have very long beards and wear overalls. The women all wear long dresses and have their hair up in buns with little white lace tops around the hair buns.

The Pennsylvania countryside is just breathtaking. The last couple of days we've driven around the countryside and the farmlands and houses/barns look just like the quaint, serene pictures of the Pennsylvania Dutch country that you see in magazines. Yesterday afternoon we stopped by an old Dutch 'smorgasboard', as their called, and it was delicious. It's just good old fashion country food, as we'd say. It's served family style, but we were the only ones at our table yesterday. They served roast beef, chicken sausage, chicken and dumplings, corn, mashed potatoes, buttered noodles and for dessert: Shoe-fly pie and peach pie. We thought shoe-fly pie was a myth or from a fairtale or something...we had no idea it's a real pie. It's made of maple syrup, sugar and stuff and didn't think it would be very good, but it was. And I don't care for maple syrup. It wasn't too sweet either. It also came with homemade vanilla ice cream. And Everything is made from scratch daily. Mark said it's one of the Best Meals he's EVER had! I loved it too.

Today we went to a huge restaurant...41,000 square feet! It was a buffet of ALL homemade stuff and the buffet line was as long as a football field. The food was just wonderful. There are more than 100 separate homemade desserts alone. Needless to say, we loved that place. And downstairs was a 41,000 square foot gift shop. That place also had their own grocery store and even make their own spices and have two smoke houses. We spent a couple of hours just walking around and checking things out. We then drove to a little shopping center full of unique shops and Amish things. Just an overall wonderful day for sure.

We'll be here through Friday and will be moving on Saturday morning. We'll be heading to Philadelphia to check out all the historic sites like the Liberty Bell, Independence center, Washington's presidential office, the house where Thomas Jefferson wrote the draft of the Constitution, etc. Oh yea, we also have pictures from our last day in DC, when we visited the National Cathedral. It looked like a medieval castle or something. The beauty was just awe-inspiring. I still need to upload our pictures of the National Cathedral as well as our Amish pictures from the last couple of days.

Well, that's about it for now...more updates to come, stay tuned!~