vip in the city

Luck o’ the Amish

Final stop: Lancaster, PA

We arrived in Lancaster with a couple hours of daylight left, in time to stop for a round of appetite-spoiling ice cream cones and to catch a drive-by glimpse of the old CTY campus at Franklin & Marshall before dinner. (Ah, memories.)

After a quiet night at the quaint Country Inn of Lancaster on Old Philadelphia Pike (which used to be known as King’s Highway, and once stretched from Philadelphia to Pittsburgh), we rose early for one final round of treasure hunting.

A few sights caught our interest along the way, like this farm market run by two young Amish women, which was overflowing with beautiful, luscious produce. We loaded up on fresh-picked corn on the cob, peaches, melons and tomatoes. But please, no photos of the women:

For lunch we set up a picnic table outside a local grocery with “smackaroni salad” (a curious cross between macaroni and potato salads), Amish chicken pot pie (best envisioned as a very thick, very salty, chilled chicken noodle soup, with hefty pasta squares in place of crust), and sweetly tangy pickled beets and eggs (which were actually far tastier than they may sound.)

We wound our way past horse-drawn buggies, through endless miles of cornfields (and the occasional strip mall), skimming along the local townships of Bird-in-Hand, Paradise, Blue Ball and Intercourse, whose saucy-sounding names I recall as a 13-year old were the source of endless snickering.

And suddenly, improbably, we happened upon the very antiques shop J and S had discovered on their last trip to Pennsylvania Dutch country some 4 years ago. It was only a matter of time before we found the farm of the woman S had been talking about seeking out for weeks: the kindly octogenarian who sold antiques out of the barn adjacent to her home. We caught up with her at her house – as she was taking a break from mowing her own lawn(!) – and though she informed us she had closed up her business a few years ago, after just a little bit of wheedling, she agreed to open up her barn and shed for our private perusal.

Our persistence paid off! It was all around the most successful sale day of our trip.