I drove the rest stop van again today. It was a wet, rainy day and there were a number of logistical challenges but they aren’t particularly interesting to recount. The most remarkable thing about today’s trip is that we rode through Mennonite country. I grew up around the Amish and Mennonites (I honestly don’t know the difference) in Upstate New York so I knew some of what to expect, but it was still really interesting. A lot of what we saw might sound very stereotyped, but it was real and true. For example we saw a number of different clotheslines with an entire family’s worth of clothes swinging in the breeze drying. I saw multiple women in muslin dresses. At one point I had to stop the van on a narrow road because a 4-5 year old boy was looking in the side of the road for his baseball. A buggy came up in the other lane and an older Amish couple started talking to the boy; I couldn’t hear what they said but I assume it was something like “get out of the road”, because he did and I moved on. We stopped at CVS and the owner told me I couldn’t park in the big parking spaces because those were for buggies, and I noticed that they had hitching posts. I also watched a team of four horses plow a field, and a man pulling an automatic hay baler with a pair of horses.
It’s beautiful country; it looks just like a postcard.
Unfortunately I don’t have a lot of great pictures because, as I say, I was stuck in a van. Also the Mennonites aren’t crazy about having you take their picture.
