Another day of touring Amish country - and a chance meeting turned this into the most interesting day of the trip.
We started out the day with a visit to Lehman's hardware store. It's sort of an Amish Home Depot - a hardware store that specializes in selling non-electric goods to the Amish and others without electricity. It's a huge store, filling four buildings:
..and is evidently quite popular with the local Amish:
We spent some time browsing around the store. The place is so large, and its selection of products so extensive, that it's difficult to describe in a few words. I should have taken some pictures inside the store. Browse around their website to get a better sense of the place.
Our next stop was back at the Amish Door for lunch. Shortly after we sat down, two women came in and sat at the table next to us. One was about our age, and the other was younger, in her twenties. The younger woman was Amish.
Now, before I go any further with this story, I need to make a short digression. One day, Terry was talking to a co-worker, and told him about going to Ohio to visit Amish country, and the co-worker told her to "say hello to Merlin." Terry didn't know what he was talking about, so he explained that Merlin was a character on the Amish Mafia TV show - and Terry still didn't know what he was talking about, so he explained about the show.
Well, since the tables in the restaurant were so close together, we couldn't help but overhear the conversation of the two ladies at the next table, and we soon realized that they were talking about Merlin. And they were talking about him, not as a character on a TV show, but as a real person. Finally, Terry's curiosity got the better of her, and she broke into their conversation and asked about Merlin. Sure enough, he's for real, a local Amish man whom the producers have roped into being part of their show - a fact which the local Amish community is none too happy about.
In fact, Merlin's family operate a local business, and later that day, we found it:
Once the ice had been broken, we continued talking. The older woman was Carol Lee Shevlin, who operates a bed and breakfast just up the road from the Amish Door. The younger woman was Lydia Ann Petersheim, oldest daughter of Noah and Mary Petersheim, a Swartzentruber Amish family who have a farm not far from Carol's B & B. Lydia and some of her sisters help out at the B & B, and Carol was taking Lydia out to lunch for her birthday.
Carol told us that the Petersheims sold handmade baskets, and offered to take us to meet them. So after we all finished lunch, we followed Carol's car down a long dirt road leading off the highway, which eventually led to the Petersheim farm. There we met Mary, the mother of the family, and Maddy, one of the other daughters (they have eleven children). We never did meet Noah, the father, who was at work that day - he works part time at a local sawmill.
We looked at the baskets, which were very well made and quite attractive, and we might have bought one, but Terry found something else that caught her attention. It was a handmade model of an Amish buggy, about a foot high and a foot and half wide, and very detailed. Terry fell in love with it, and we bought it. It was way too large to put in our suitcase, so Carol said she would ship it to us, which she did, and here it is:
We stayed there talking to Mary and Carol for about an hour. We told them about some of the places we'd been visiting, and they verified that Yoder's was an excellent choice. Terry got to pet one of their cows, a young heifer (hey, that's a big thrill for a city girl). She also asked if Mary would write down some recipes for her, which Mary agreed to do. When the buggy arrived, it was accompanied by handwritten recipes for Banana Cake and Peach Cream Pie. If you're interested, you can see the recipes here. We've made the Peach Cream Pie, and it was delicious.
Since coming back to California, we've kept in touch with Carol regularly by email. Her B & B is called Simple Pleasures, and here's its website. We haven't stayed there, of course, but if it's as nice as she is, it should be a great place to stay. Tell her we sent you.
After taking our leave of Carol and the Petersheims, we drove back to Roscoe Village. One thing I always like to do on my vacations is to buy music that evokes memories of where we've been. One of the shops at Roscoe Village was a music store. It had been closed when we had been there on Monday, and I wanted to go back to see what CDs I could find. Alas, while the store had lots of musical instruments and books of sheet music, it had only about a half dozen CDs by local artists. I bought one, which turned out to be pleasant enough, but nothing exciting.
Driving around the area for the last few days, I had begun to notice that many houses were decorated with large five-pointed stars:
I've seen these referred to as "Amish Stars," but Terry asked Carol about them, and she said that's a misnomer; the Amish wouldn't decorate their houses like that - and of course, the car in that last picture means it couldn't be an Amish house. Carol says that they're more likely to be Mennonite homes. The Mennonites are similar to the Amish, but less strict - Carol comes from a Mennonite family.