This part of northern Indiana is a stronghold of the Amish people, and wherever you travel around the communities of Elkhart, Goshen, Nappanee, and the surrounding area, you are likely to see Amish women  in their simple handmade dresses, their heads covered in white kapps, and men wearing black straw hats or stocking caps.

There are a lot of misconceptions about the Amish people, including that they will not ride in automobiles, use electricity, or telephones. Drive anywhere around here and you will encounter horse drawn buggies and wagons on the roadways.

But, while they do not drive automobiles, the Amish will ride in them, and they frequently hire a non-Amish driver to take them to restaurants, stores, or other places too far to conveniently reach by buggy.

Drive any Amish back road in this region, and you will see small white structures in some yards that look like an enclosed telephone booth, and that is exactly what they are! Their religion does not permit a telephone in the house, and the “phone haus” is built for function, not comfort. There is no heat or cooling, and usually no chair. This is a place to do business, not sit and gab! If an Amish person advertises something for sale, they will include the telephone number and instructions to “call between 7 and 8 a.m.” or whatever time suits their schedule.

Yesterday, we drove out to Nappanee to visit with our friend Carylye Lehman at Focal Wood Products. Carlyle is a fantastic craftsman who built the desk units in our Winnebago motorhome last year, and he has a fast growing reputation with RVers for top quality custom wood furniture.

The tools in Carlyle’s shop are all powered by electricity, courtesy of a huge 40 KW diesel generator.  So as you can see, while the Amish do avoid many of the “modern” conveniences of our way of life, they have embraced some technology to give them the ability to conduct business.

We have also found it interesting to see Amish buggies lined up at the drive through window at McDonald’s, or to note such goodies as Pepsi and potato chips in their shopping carts at WalMart.

All day yesterday the wind blew hard, with gusts up to 40 miles per hour. If the wind lets up a little bit, we plan to leave Elkhart Campground today and start making our way eastward toward the Hershey (Pennsylvania) Thousand Trails preserve, where we will have a vendor booth at the Hershey RV Show next week.

It’s about 600 miles to our destination, and we’ll do it in two days. I have no idea where we’ll be tonight, but there is always an RV friendly WalMart, a truck stop, or someplace else to get off the road for the night.

Thought For The Day – Never put off until tomorrow what you can do the day after.

We had another busy day yesterday. I had a lot of work to get done, but I decided to cheat and go play for a while first. There was a gun show in Shipshewana, the Amish center 20 miles east of Elkhart, and I have wanted to get out that way and drop some bundles of sample issues of the Gypsy Journal at the campgrounds in that area, so I decided to combine business with pleasure.

Shipshewana, best known for its flea market, is an interesting place. In the past I have called it sort of an Amish theme town, in that you will see lots of Amish people in their horse drawn buggies and plain clothes, but also shops packed with tourists buying everything from overpriced quilts and crafts, to delicious cheeses. You can even (for a fee) take a ride in an authentic Amish buggy!

And Shipshewana is always a busy place! The main street through the business district is only a mile or so long, but it can take you a long time to cover that distance with all of the traffic. Cars, tour buses, RVs, buggies, Amish riding bicycles, and people on foot create an obstacle course that you have to be very careful to maneuver safely through.

After an hour or so of wandering through the gun show, and wishing I had kept all of the shooting irons I have sold over the years, I dropped Miss Terry off at E&S Sales, an Amish bulk food store, and then backtracked to drop off a couple of bundles of newspapers at the Shipshewana South Campground. There is also a Shipshewana North Campground a couple of miles north of town, which we had hit on the way in. The northern campground is never as full as the southern, which is within walking distance to everything in town, and both places are always clean and have friendly people in the office.

E&S was packed with shoppers, and when I caught up with Terry we spent a while browsing everything from a huge assortment of flour and other baking goods, to bulk candy and a dozen or more varieties of cheeses.

We had spent more time in Shipshewana than we had planned to, and when we left we stopped at a roadside produce stand, and when we left there, I told Terry I had to get right to work as soon as we got home. Yeah, right!

Dennis and Carol Hill from the RV Driving School had arrived at Elkhart Campground while we were gone, and as we pulled up we saw them and they came over to say hello and tell us all about their summer adventures RVing in Alaska. We just have to make that trip one of these days! Sometime during their visit, somebody mentioned dinner, and Terry and I realized that it was 5 p.m. and we had not had anything to eat all day long. So we piled into their car and went to Ryan’s Buffet for dinner and more good conversation. 

When we returned to the campground, Ruth Fleck and Linda Jensen were waiting at the bus. We had met them in Albuquerque at the Affinity Rally, and ran into them again at the FMCA rally in Bowling Green, Ohio a couple of weeks ago. We visited with them for a while, and Bill Joyce and Diane Melde wandered over to join in the party.

Finally, about 8 p.m., I excused myself and went inside to get some work done. Sometimes you just have to throw your plans out the window and go with the flow.

Thought For The Day – Dream as if you will live forever, live as if you will die tomorrow.

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