September 21st and 22nd

Lancaster County, PA is considered the heart  of Amish Country.  It is exceptionally beautiful here, rolling hills with pretty, tidy farms tucked in the shallow valleys.  Although the Amish clearly live right along side the World, the whole area of small towns exudes a peacefulness that I’ve not seen elsewhere.  I suspect living side by side with these people , and in this slow moving, pastoral setting has a peaceful influence over all.

There are clearly areas that have been hijacked by those who want to make some tourist dollars off the charm of the area and the people, such as the outlet store near our hotel called, AMISH STUFF.  So not quaint.  But mostly it is earnestly quaint, and simple.  And we did buy pickles!  And jam and other Amish made treats.  We happened to pass by a little cheesy looking restaurant which was clearly stuffed full of locals...and we thought...aha!  This is the place to eat!  And it was lovely.  Most of the waitresses were sweet Mennonite girls, and the patrons were locals and Amish men.

Amish farmers harvesting corn

cute Amish kids who were waving at us from the back of their buggy

Today's watchwords are "cute Pennsylvania towns"  which Polly and I could have easily spent the rest of our days in, the boys just wanted to go eat something.

cute steeples in cute Pennsylvania town

cute stone building in cute Pennsylvania town "Oh, look!"  says Sparky, "Another stone building, you should take another picture of it."

whizzing past a cute stone house in a cute Pennsylvania town,  I am sure you are getting the picture

Spending this day wandering aimlessly about was a sweet ending as the next two days will be pretty long travelling days back to Ottawa.  We headed as far north toward the border of Pennsylvania and New York State as our kids could tolerate (farther than they could tolerate, in fact...our mistake).  We hadn't booked a hotel, and after phoning about twelve hotels, found a somewhat underwhelming and overpriced place to sleep.  It was the last room they had even.

Apparently this run on hotels had something to do with flooding relief in Pennsylvania.  There has been a lot of quite horrific weather since we have been here, all of which we have missed, except for a couple of very peripheral stormy nights. Today we got caught in a brief but violent storm.

A storm through the windshield

the children pretending to be alarmed at the storm

  The eastern earthquake that caused such a stir actually happened while we were in the air flying to Ottawa.  Hurricane Irene ran ahead of us, and our weather has been quite lovely.  However, footprints of that hurricane were seen in several Eastern locations that we were in, mostly large trees down in cities.

Our drive through Pennsylvania today was very nice.  I am taking photos of the deciduous forest at changing latitudes, from 41 degrees to 45 which we'll reach tomorrow in Ottawa.  We made it across the border and travelled a couple of  hours along one of the "Finger Lakes" in the region below Lake Ontario.  Today we juxtaposed the life of simplicity with the life of consumerism and spent a couple of hours at a giant outlet mall in Waterloo, NY.

It was boring.

So we are overnighting in Syracuse, NY, and heading out tomorrow to stay with mammals in Ottawa again. 

Taughannock Falls, Ulysses, NY