By Kevin Williams
It’s impossible to distill Lancaster County, Pennsylvania into a single post. It’s a place full of 21st century fun that lives alongside farms scarcely changed for 200 years. You have buggies clip-clopping on the road, an Amish businesses equipped with the latest computer technology. There are some real juxtopositions in Amish country and you find them plentiful in Lancaster. All-you-can-eat buffets serving heaping helpings of Amish style food compete with McDonalds for diners.
I visited Lancaster County for the first time back in the summer of 1991. I brought my bike and just biked through the beautiful countryside, a countryside that is now under much more attack by suburban sprawl. I doubt I’d want to go biking today amid all the car-clogged, tourist-bus filled roads.
But I can better describe it all in photos, so join me below:
The sprawling Amish View Inn on Old Philadelphia Pike east of Lancaster. Now, I am sure it is a wonderful place to stay. But it’s not, personally, my style. Too big….if I am going to Amish Country, I want quaint and cozy.
You can partake in the “Amish Experience” at the Amish View Inn. Here you can watch “Jacob’s Choice” is an entertaining and educational way to understand and experience what it means to “grow up Amish.” This one-of-a-kind “experiential” theater takes you into the lives of the Fisher family, and re-creates dramatic scenes from Amish history relevant to today through five screens and exciting special effects.. It probably is a good production and I’d probably enjoy it, but sometimes it all just seems like too much touristy stuff….
And you can fill your belly at the Smokehouse at the AmishView Inn..
And if the AmishView Inn is not enough for you, you can explore Amish country by going for a buggy ride here at Jessica’s or at Abe’s Buggy Rides down the road (I’ve taken a ride from Abe’s before)
The beastly buses are all over Amish Country, ferrying tourists to huge all-you-can-establishments.
Kauffman’s is a favorite stop along Old Philadelphia Pike
I imagine the Amish enjoy off-peak tourist times like February because they can travel down the roads and they aren’t quite as bumper-to-bumper as other times of year, like spring, summer, and peak fall times.
This is farther south in Ronks and perhaps there is no greater illustration – that I have seen – that shows just how much suburbia is butting up against traditional Amish areas…here you have Target right next to an old Amish attraction.
4 Comments
Barbara Abel
My Great-great-grandfather was the toll-house keeper at the toll house in Salunga PA on what is now Rte. 30. (I still have the toll house clock and it still runs!) so I know how much has changed there. But so many of those good people still keep going on and going on – keeping the old ways. I admire them and hope their lives continue to be lived as they wish. I now live very nearby to the Westcliffe CO community…many of them have taken up the ways of ‘the English’ over the years…but they are still industrious hard working people trying to make a living and a life…I admire them too! We’ve had a carriage shop for years, and when we would go to Lancaster County from our home just outside of Phila (that was YEARS ago!) we would go to the homes and shops of the working people (who happen to also be Amish) to purchase our wagon supplies…what sweet, welcoming people they are…and how unbelivelably rude tourists are to walk onto their front porch and photo inside their homes…good grief…if tourists did that to us in our Colorado homes they could wake up dead!! Thanks Keven.
Kevin
How neat, Barbara, thanks for sharing that, you have quite a treasure in that old tollhouse clock!
pamela lakits
Dear Kevin, I enjoyed looking at your Lancaster photo’s. It’s always fun to go along for the ride with you as you visit different Amish communities. I especially liked your last photo and comment. My husband and I try and go to Lancaster end of October -early November every year for our anniversary. We usually stay at the Best Western in Paradise because we like to go to the Paul Revere Inn for lunch or dinner at least once (they are a bit expensive). Any way, one day last year when we were there I for some reason (which I have forgotten) needed to run into the very same Target and I had the very same thought you did. Seeing the Target smack up against the Amish tour home made me sad. Just didn’t seem right some how. Your photo says it all, doesn’t it, about the chances being made there and not all are for the good.
Sincerely,
Pam Lakits
Kevin
Sounds like a wonderful anniversary trip, Pamela! And, yes, that Target, geez, it is just sort of wedged in there right up against that Amish attraction, kind of odd!