We spent yesterday exploring the back roads of Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, and what a wonderful time we had!

This is the heart of Pennsylvania’s Amish country, and on every back road we traveled we saw Amish farms, usually with laundry hanging on clotheslines, and livestock in their pens. 

 

This swaybacked horse looks like he’s seen better days, and is living out his golden years in retirement.

We always love wandering around the back roads, because we never know what we’ll find around the next bend in the road.

The Amish are enterprising people, and besides farming, they operate a lot of little cottage industries. We saw signs for fresh produce and flowers, eggs, root beer, handmade quilts, brooms, and furniture.

We saw a lot of horse drawn Amish buggies sharing the road with cars and trucks. The horses amaze me, because they don’t seem to be bothered at all by cars speeding past them.

The Amish also work their fields with horse powered equipment. Isn’t this a handsome team of work animals?

I didn’t know that the Amish grew tobacco as a cash crop until yesterday.

It’s harvest time, and we pulled off the side of the road to watch them cutting and stacking the tobacco on wagons.

Just a couple of fields away, this fellow was harvesting corn.

We passed several groups of Amish schoolchildren on their way home after a long day of lessons. Almost all of them seemed to be carrying coolers instead of lunch buckets like we did as kids.

This boy seemed to be in a hurry, running past all of his schoolmates. He must have had chores that needed doing.

I got a chuckle out of some of the names of the towns we visited, including Blue Ball.

If that names makes you uncomfortable, you probably don’t want to know that Intercourse is only few miles away. How do you spell relief?

For years people have been telling us that we needed to check out the Shady Maple Smorgasbord near Blue Ball, and I’m glad we did!

Can you believe that this is the lobby of a buffet restaurant, and not a fancy hotel lobby?

And what a buffet it was! The selection was huge, including both New York Strip and Delmonico steaks, smoked pork chops, fried chicken, shrimp, and at least a half dozen other entrees, and more sides than I could count. Everything was fresh and hot, and the dessert bar was unbelievable.

But if that wasn’t enough, they also had a chocolate fountain where we could dip fresh strawberries, bananas, pretzels, and other goodies. Can you say decadent?

We arrived back at the Thousand Trails campground tired, with our tummies full, and with memories we’ll have for a lifetime of our day of exploring.

Thought For The Day – The silence is part of the music.

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I spent most of yesterday working on a website for Carlyle Lehman at Focal Wood Products. Many people are surprised to learn that while the Amish people live a much simpler lifestyle than most of us, with their horses and buggies, they do in fact make use of many modern conveniences, including telephones, electricity, and even the internet.

Every Amish community has its own rules as to how much of the “English world” (as they call life among the non-Amish), they can incorporate into their homes and businesses. While the Amish don’t own or drive cars, they will hire someone to take them where they need to go if it is too far for their buggies, and crews of Amish workers at local factories car pool in vans driven by non-Amish co-workers.

If you drive past the Amish farms on some of the back roads here in northern Indiana, you will see small wooden structures at the end of the driveway at every third or fourth home. These are shared telephone booths, where they can make and receive calls relating to business. But these booths are not heated and do not have a seat, to prevent them from spending much time chatting. We often see newspaper advertisements for items for sale, with a telephone number and the notation “Call between 7:30 and 8 a.m.” Those are the hours when they will be monitoring the telephone to receive calls. For businesses such as Focal Wood Products, they have a voice mail system, so if we call when Carlyle is busy, we leave a message and he calls us back. It’s not quite as convenient as calling a traditional business, but it works for them.

In the case of his website, Carlyle received permission from his community to have one to advertise his products, but he cannot build or maintain it himself. That’s where I got involved, and it’s been an interesting experience working with someone whose culture is different in so many ways from our own.

I mentioned a while back that I have co-authored a new book on self-publishing, titled The Step-By-Step Guide to Self-Publishing for Profit. Last week I received my first copy of the book, hot off the press, and I’m very pleased with it. All of the credit goes to my co-author, Christy Pinheiro, who conceived the project and handled all of the production details. For more information, here is a link to the book’s website. Check it out; you too could be a published author!  

One of the things I suggest on my self-publishing website, Publishing4Profit, is producing small niche guides aimed at very targeted markets. Examples would be our Guide to Free Campgrounds and Overnight Parking Places, and our Guide to Casino Camping.

I don’t know if Dale Sumner from Mobile RV Medic, Inc. spent any time reading the website or coming to any of my seminars, but he recently published a very good guide, titled Basic RV Electricity and Protection, which is an excellent primer for anyone who owns an RV. Dale packs a lot of excellent information into the book, without getting buried in technical details that the average RVer could not understand. If you want to know what happens when you plug your RV’s electrical cord into a campground’s pedestal, and how to avoid overloading the circuit, and how to protect your rig from problems, this is an easy to understand guide that is well worth the money. You can order your copy at www.lulu.com/basicRVelectricity or e-mail Dale at sales@mobileRVmedic.com.

Of course, if you’re staying at an upscale RV resort such as Retama Village in Mission, Texas, you won’t have to worry about things like electrical problems. My friend Jack Mayer owns a couple of RV lots at Retama Village, and Jack and some of the other lot owners have set up a website, Retama Rentals, to market their lots when they are not staying on them. We paid a visit to friends at Retama last winter, and I can tell you it’s the nicest RV resort we have ever seen! So if you’re thinking about spending some time in the Valley this winter, check out Jack’s website.

While I was busy building a website this weekend, Bad Nick wrote a new post for the Bad Nick Blog titled We’re Going To Lose The War On Terror. Check it out, it will give you something to think about.

Thought For The Day – Anything in the future will always look better because there’s always something wrong in the present.

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