Post #3: Amish Country and the Phillies Game

Hanging out at the La Quinta Inn in Roanoke, Virginia. We hoofed it down from Philly and may make it back to Dallas on Tuesday night, two days ahead of schedule. It feels like the trip is over but instead of one day of plane travel we have 3-4 of driving. It's kind of weird but we're still very much on vacation, taking backroads through Appalachians tomorrow rather than cheating and taking I-81/I-40/I-30 all the way.

Before we get to the trip, here are some notes we left out. First, a great way to pronounce Skyline, as in Skyline Chili in Cincinnati, is ‘ska-lee-nee’. Second, our guide on the Youghigheny told us about some ways crazy people ride rapids in rafts. My favorite is the ‘tombstone’ where five people get in the back of a raft, making the front end rise up almost vertically, and literally hop from rapid to rapid. Another is the ‘postage stamp’ where, in order to get through a certain crazy rapid, the raft must become completely vertical against a rock in order to get through. Needless to say, we didn’t try either one. Thirdly, we’ve seen several signs on the road warning us that ‘Speed Enforced by Aircraft’. Anybody have any insight to that? Do we get strafed by a police plane? Unmanned aerial vehicles? Superman? We figure that the money Pennsylvania saved by having crummy historical signs is being spent on the aircraft.

Alright, back to the trip. So on Thursday we drove out of the Allegheny Mountains and into real Pennsylvania. Very few roads go east-west across southern Pennsylvania due to the craziness of the mountains so we were forced to drive on the Pennsylvania Turnpike (a toll road). It was relatively cheap though: $4.10 to go maybe thirty miles. On ALT-183 north of Austin, I think that will get you 100 yards, eh! We veered off the toll road at a town called Breezewood and hit US Highway 30, a road going southeast to Gettysburg. Gettysburg, site of the historic Civil War battle, is apparently a huge biker hang-out which made it not a big favorite of ours. Plus US 30 was very busy with tons of trucks. It was a big change from our two days of relaxing in the Alleghenies, that’s for sure.

We continued on to York, a town large enough to have a Best Buy, where we bought a new, smaller and fancier digital camera for $100 less than the one I ruined on the Youghigheny. That was good. We also ate burgers at Five Guys, a local burger chain out here. That was good. I also sang about 10 made-up versions of the ‘Grand Old Duke of York’ song for Jennifer’s benefit. That was bad. We were glad to leave York behind us, eh!

Not far beyond York was Lancaster County, home to about 29,000 Amish folks. Let’s get this out of the way right now: we were somewhat disappointed with our visit to Amish Country. Being so close to Philly and Lancaster being such a large municipality, it was definitely not an out-of-the-way peaceful spot in the middle of nowhere. There was lots of traffic and tons of tourists everywhere (like us, eh). Plus the Amish are not the folks living in the 1700s like we all think. They use tons of modern conveniences such as running water, refridgerators and lamps. For the most part they draw the line at using electricity but they use telephones (albeit sparingly), the postal service and even travel (there’s an Amish resort in Sarasota, Florida), usually by bus. We also saw lots of Amish working in non-Amish places like in a modern kitchen, playing with what looked like an iPhone and working a cash register. It was fun to see their horse buggies walking on the shoulders of the highways though.

Our first stop on Thursday in Lancaster County was the site of what our Fodor’s guide said was a historical museum but what actually seemed to be the Amish outlet mall, consisting of a huge parking lot and tons of stores selling things that weren’t necessarily Amish such as Vera Bradley purses. Way to go Fodor’s. That’s where we saw the full-service kitchen where the Amish women were canning pickles. I was going to buy some Amish-made salsa until Jennifer reminded me that salsa is really a Texas thing that the Amish have no business making in the first place. Crisis averted.

More Amish trivia. You can tell if a man is married by his face and clothes. Unmarried men are clean-shaven while married men have the crazy beard around the chin thing going on. Unmarried men wear a hat that has a crease at the top while married men make do with a hat that is flat. You can’t tell by the shoes though; all Amish men might be seen wearing tennis shoes.

Our second ‘stop’ in Lancaster County, near the town of Intercourse (intercourse is the old timey name for a road intersection), was for another museum to learn about the Amish but, thanks to Fodor’s again, it didn’t exist either. So we drove around a little bit before deciding to call it a day rather early (3:30) and head to our B&B. That night’s lodgings were in the heart of Columbia, PA, on the banks of the monstrous Susquehanna River. The B&B was in a very ritzy but old-fashioned three-story house. We were offered an upgrade on our room to a slightly bigger one but we liked the location of our room as it was away from the main drag and all of its biker noise (and, unbeknownst to us, closer to the innkeeper’s husband and his Los Lonely Boys CDs playing that night). After making ourselves at home, we did our laundry at a laundromat around the corner (the place where we wrote the last e-mail) and then found dinner, after spending ten minutes driving through Columbia, in Marietta, the next town over. Jennifer has been on an eternal quest to find a salad with green, rather than pale white iceberg, lettuce and was thwarted yet again by a little Italian joint we found (though Matt’s salami and cheese sandwich was delicious).

The next day we hit the city of Lancaster and were reunited with traffic congestion. Gosh we didn’t realize how good we had it when we were cruising the Ohio River and hiding out in the Alleghenies! Lancaster was busy with a capital b. We somehow found parking and visited another large central market that also featured some Amish folks selling things. All we found were a magnet and some postcards but really, we’re not big souvenir buyers anyway so that wasn’t a problem. We wandered around just long enough to have to pay the 2 hour rate on our parking instead of 1 hour and then headed out of town and to the little town of Strasburg. Strasburg had, 0.7 of a mile off the main freeway, an Amish ‘village’ where you could have a tour guide teach you about the ways of the Amish. Our guide was a local teenager who had grew up around them so she had some interesting information to relate including about how the Amish don’t continue school past the eighth grade and had a Supreme Court case to reinforce this (and also not pay into Social Security). We toured a house and a school and got to see a bunch of other stuff. It was a good way to finally learn more about them without the awkwardness of asking an actual Amish person. Apparently their numbers have, since they have 7-10 kids per family, doubled in the past ten years in Lancaster County so they’re not going anywhere anytime soon.

That was it for Amish Country so we headed on in to Philly around 2pm. Good thing we went early because Philadelphia traffic, even on an early Friday afternoon going INTO town, was absolutely insane. Nobody was going anywhere. What should have taken us an hour and a half instead took around three and a half due to the traffic and also our inability to find our hotel in the maze of one-way streets in downtown Philly. Our hotel was a Best Western located near the city center at a very good rate actually but, as we should have known concerning cheap hotels in good locations, the facilities leave something to be desired. For example, you couldn’t get hot water from the sink, only being able to get it from the tub. The door wouldn’t always open, even when the key worked, and the doorframe was bent so bad it looked like somebody had had to get in one time with a crowbar. There were almost no outlets in the room, there was no ventilator for the bathroom so the whole bathroom steamed up everytime someone took a shower and the air conditioner was so loud we cranked it up before we went to bed and then turned it off for the night. Oh, and the Robinsons were having their family reunion and it seemed like they’d taken up half the hotel due to their noise.

Luckily we left at 5:30 or so to get to the Phillies-Pirates game. Thankfully Philly has a subway system that would take us right to the park. We hoofed it eight blocks down Spring Garden St and caught a direct subway line to the ‘sports complex’ where Citizens Bank Park (Phillies), Lincoln Financial Field (Eagles), the hockey rink and the basketball arena all are in close proximity. We’re assuming they share their parking spaces, eh. The Philadelphia subway, unlike some other subways we could mention, was very easy to figure out how to use (tokens) and get where you were going so we made it to the stadium without any problems.

Our seats were chosen due to a) their location between the foul poles and b) their view of the Jumbotron. The former is my requirement while the latter is Jennifer’s. Since the Jumbotron is over left field, we had seats by the right field foul pole. The stadium is a really nice open air stadium and the seats were great except we couldn’t see deep right field or the bullpen. We had a couple of hard-core Phillies fans sitting in front of us who gave us some insight into the team and feigned awe that we had come all the way from Texas. The Phillies won the World Series last year so it was like everybody was still enjoying that honeymoon what with all the video montages on the Jumbotron and World Champs merchandise available. You’d think the team had cured cancer. The game went really well for the Phillies too. Down 1-0 on an early homer by Garrett Jones, the Phils scored 3 runs in one of the middle innings to take a 3-1 lead. That led to Brad ‘Lights Out’ Lidge, the former Astros closer, coming in in the top of the ninth with one out and the bases empty. Brad proceeded to strike out the next batter and then, after getting a 3-2 count and all of us in the stadium standing up and applauding since the game was almost over, allowed a solo homer to bring it to 3-2. The next guy got a base hit before Lidge somehow struck out the next guy to end the game.

I must say one of the highlights of the game was the Philly Phanatic, the silly alien mascot. He was hilarious. His first act was to drive an ATV around the field twice, leaving his tire tracks across the impeccably-groomed outfield grass. He taunted the Pirates bench. He rubbed a bald guy’s head in the choir who were going to sing the national anthem. He danced with a 6-year old girls’ dance troupe. He got up on the Phillies dugout and tried to teach a scared 8-year old boy how to do the pelvic thrust that makes his huge gut/butt surge forward. In short, he was what every mascot should be. Unfortunately, he was also a sad reminder of how Orbit, the Houston Astros’ mascot, used to be big and round too before inexplicably slimming down after a couple of seasons in the mid-90s. Actually, I don’t know if Orbit is still around.

Our game had a bonus: a massive post-game fireworks show. The only catch was that the fireworks were going to be going off so close to the stadium that the outfield bleachers had to be completely clear. Our usher was actually advising us to relocate during the seventh-inning stretch to the upper deck on the first base side, despite the fact that the game appeared to be sold out. What did we do? We waited until the game was over, then moved to some empty seats just outside the foul pole. Our necks hurt from watching the fireworks but the display was fantastic. Afterward, we caught the subway back to near the hotel and made it back without incident.

Yesterday we wandered around Philly but it’s already 10:30 and we have a long day of cruising the Appalachians in four states tomorrow so I’d better wrap this up. Will try to write more mañana.