After that we headed out on a loop through Paradise (Like in Weird Al's "Amish Paradise" song)
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Intercourse (yes, that is the name of the town)
and Bird In Hand (yet another odd Amish town name).
We took a lot of back country roads and saw a bunch of farms with the Amish out plowing with their horses and their laundry hanging to dry. We also passed a bunch of horse drawn buggies. Why don't I have pictures? Well, since Mozambique I've been wrestling with taking pictures of other people's life styles as a tourist. How would you feel if people from all over the world came to stare at you like you were in a zoo and take pictures of you doing your everyday work, often times without your permission? What's so entertaining about it? It was also hard to find a place to pull over on the road to pull out a camera. It was nice to just drive through the community and experience it.
We also ran into a guy in the Intercourse visitor's center that was Amish and we talked for a long time, mostly about religion and the motivations and ideals that lead the Amish to live the way they do. He was old order Amish growing up, but recently left to be with what he called the, "Fellowship", which is a group of Amish that use cars and things. It was interesting that his motivations for leaving the Old Order were on the basis of his born again view of Christ and his atonement, not because of the lifestyle or strict use of technologies.
