Day 9--Intercourse, PA

We won't even go into the jokes about the name of the town. They have a place here, the Kountry Kettle Village, that is a collection of shops and places to eat. I don't consider it Amish and it is very touristy, but we did my favorite thing here: we took an hour buggy ride through the Amish countryside. We had a young Amish girl named SarahJane as our driver/guide and only 3 other people in our buggy. I wanted to make sure we went early before the tour buses unloaded and things got really crowded. It was a lovely ride through the countryside while she told us more about Amish life and answered questions. We got to meet her sister, see her family's farm and see where her dad and brother worked at a furniture shop.






We enjoyed it so much, we could have spent the whole day just riding around seeing the farms, but we only had an hour. Back at the tourist trap we had lunch and stopped at the canning company where we managed to stimulate the economy. Marcia has several varieties of rhubarb jellies and some pickled baby beets and I have a jar of apple cinnamon jelly. We also found a few more things at other shops along the way. Deciding that we really didn't want to buy a bunch of stuff, we wandered over to the animals, where Marcia found a very pushy llama, who knew exactly where the machine was to get the treats and would wait (not very patiently) for her to get treats out and then push the two sheep out of the way and get all of the treats for himself.


The parking lot was now absolutely packed with cars and over a dozen buses, so we headed out to a miniature golf course I had seen a sign for that was just a bit up the road. I did really well on the first 9 then just fell apart. Marcia beat me by 5 strokes, so we are now at 1-1. We will have to find another place to play and have a final playoff before we leave.

The weather has been just about absolutely perfect--only hitting the upper 70s with lots of sunshine. We have seen so many wonderful old houses on this trip as well. Old brick houses that are just beautiful. We want to go to the door and knock and ask if we can look inside to see the layout. People would probably look at us kind of funny if we did that, but there are some really neat little places we would like to look at.

TIme to head out for dinner. We have an interesting and varied day planned for tomorrow.