The Amish Spectrum

We've just spent a gorgeous day exploring backroads throughout Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, acquainting ourselves with Amish culture.

The township of Intercourse (yes, it's really called that) had a great collection of home crafts, bakehouses and smokehouses where we picked up a variety of nibbles.

The kids also met some farmyard friends at a free animal feeding station.

We tried a traditionally-made soft pretzel. I hadn't been much of a pretzel fan before today, but that's all changed.

Nearby Lititz has the nation's oldest commercial pretzel bakery, so I guess we picked the best area to try a 'real' one.

We also stopped in at a few roadside farm stalls.

So we've managed to restock on fruit and vegetables, bread, cheese, and various smoky meat delights.

We also bought a Shoo Fly Pie (apparently it's the bee's knees of the pie world) but I'm now too full to try it after a big lunch at Dienner's Restaurant on Lincoln Highway.

The traditional Amish fare went down an absolute treat with all of us.

On the quieter streets, we've delighted in seeing Amish siblings driving themselves home from school in little carts led by donkeys.

On all roads but the interstate we've seen countless Amish adults driving their horse-drawn buggies here, there and everywhere.

Sometimes we just had to close our eyes and cross our fingers as the trucks and other vehicles crossed on to the other side of the road to pass them. There's certainly a high potential for head-on collisions here.

We saw a lone man trying to harvest corn from his field with his team of horses and an ancient-looking harvesting device.

Around another bend we glimpsed an entire family working together in a field.

It seemed to us the epitome of the Amish way of simple living.

Then further along the road we came to an intersection, stopped behind an Amish buggy.

As it put on its flashing right-turn indicator, we simultaneously turned off our little session of idealising.

Then we hit the next road and spied an Amish man zooming along the sidewalk on his mobility scooter.

So clearly there is a spectrum of Amishness and the Amish can't all be sitting at the super strict end of it.

Either that or there's a lot of ineffective shunning going on.

Another surprise for me today was that although the Amish are known as the Pennsylvania Dutch, they're not descended from the Dutch at all.

The word "Dutch" came from "Deutsch" because they were in fact German-speaking Swiss immigrants who sought to escape religious persecution by settling in a more tolerant place.

As we drove into our campsite which just happened to have electricity and cable TV and the boys became instantly transfixed by Spongebob Squarepants and his salty silliness, I couldn't help but wonder if the Amish aren't on to something...

They get to spend most of their lives outdoors working the earth (big-time satisfaction there); they believe in simple living (imagine the money they'd save on electronics alone); they embrace humility (they probably get ready for the day as fast as superman); the girls all wear long dresses and bonnets (hairy legs and hat hair would be de rigueur); they have on average 7 children.....

Okay, clearly I need to give this a little more thought.