There is a land not-so-far away where as many men wear straw hats and suspenders as do those with baseball caps and cargo shorts. It’s a place where the clip-clop along the back roads of farming country is heard from graceful horses pulling the buggies of Amish gentlemen. It’s a land where the sweet aroma of Apple Pies cooling on a windowsill float in the air – where the spring earth is plowed with a team of horses. It’s a place where little boys with black trousers gather eggs. This is Pennsylvania Dutch Country. This is Lancaster County.
We came to this magical place to see a play called Noah, but we spent three days in this unique setting, just poking around, eating amazing foods and admiring the lives of these hard-working people.
To get to Lancaster, we asked our GPS lady to guide us there and she did – right through the traffic of Northern Virginia, D.C., and Baltimore. Even though it was a mid-Monday morning, angry cars and drivers lined the 6 and 8 lane highways not slowing down even a bit during a pouring thunderstorm. It was white-knuckle driving for about 4 hours. Then the world changed.
We pulled onto a gentle highway with bright red barns and greener-than-green fields as far as the eye could see. We saw heavy stands of clover and alfalfa, and plowed ground awaiting new seeds. We crossed gurgling spring creeks dotted with watercress. Near the barns were hundreds of Holstein cows in need of milking. We finally pulled our car into the driveway of our Airbnb cottage in the middle of an Amish farm. We had finally arrived.
The trip back home would be different. We would head west to Harrisburg, PA, taking in more of the Pennsylvania countryside, then due south to Virginia. It would take a little longer but some things in life are worth a little more time on the road and this was one of them.
