#Laterpost: Amish Country, PA

These are pictures from the first leg of our trip. We left Boston on March 28 and took about a week to travel down the east coast to Virginia. This picks up where my last Laterpost, about Philadelphia, ends. To read that post, click here.

After we left the Philadelphia KOA, we took a drive through Amish country.  "Amish Country" is kind of a catch-all term that applies to Lancaster County, PA, and the surrounding farmlands, which are home to a high percentage of the US Amish population.  It's a beautiful area filled with rolling hills, modest homes, farms, and the perpetual aroma of fresh manure lingering softly in the air.

I can smell the poop just looking at this picture.

The Bird-in-Hand Bakery

There are also some super cute small businesses that sell delicious baked goods, and/or little trinkets the Jewish side of my family would refer to as tchotchkes.

Josh admiring some tchotchkes

Christmas tchotchkes

Halloween tchotchkes

Pretty tchotchkes

Josh bought me these cupcake tchotchkes for baking.

We were on a tight schedule, so we unfortunately only got to spend an hour milling about the shops. My favorite part about this stop was seeing how the Amish people live. I loved seeing horse-drawn carriages, modest houses, and full clotheslines. The farmlands were beautiful and the horizons unmarred by tall buildings. I had no previous experience with Amish people, besides having watched a couple episodes of Breaking Amish when it first came out (and I have a tiny hunch that the show was not an entirely accurate representation of what the Amish are all about). It was a cool insight into what life is like for these people that I knew nothing about beforehand.