After an eight hour drive and a stayover in a Mainstay (3 stars from the eighties), we woke up in Amish Country, aka Dutch country Pennsylvania. A breeze of paradise filled the fields of wheat all around us, neatly stacked into straight formations of harvest-ready, crisply brown, plant battalions. Behind the pearly white fences smiled at us baby calves, piglets, and Dutch horses. They were obviously familiar with camcorders, because when I pulled one out, they gathered around, showing off.
As Abby pointed out many times throughout the day, the Amish get "disturbed" by any sort of intrusion into their life, including photography, driving around their farms, and offering snacks to Amish kids so they come closer. However, they were less disturbed by offerings of good old cash for their tomatoes, home-brewed root beer, and brownies. We used the commercial stops to photograph their farm-long clotheslines and parked horse buggies. The current Amish fashion for men is the familiar round spectacles, suspenders (Abby's favorites), and a face-round beard, very much like the Celtics's mascot.
The day's highlight was a meeting with an Amish boy, a golden wonder of maybe 9-10 years, who manned a rootbeer stand. The kid's hands were enlarged by generations of Dutchmen to the size of the average basketball player with a side job as a miner.
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