WELCOME to Between The Lines

This is my chronicle of my occasional travels about the country. I started it in 2010 for my trip on my 2005 Harley Road King Classic for Big Daddy's Gulf Coast Gypsy Tour to New Orleans...Read below to find out about it! NEW REQUEST FOR READERS! If you are following this blog, sign in as a follower! That way I get to know who my audience is, which makes it more fun. Thanks!

In 2011 its the same destination, and its another Big Daddy Gypsy Tour, but on a different bike (my new Road Glide Ultra) and via a different route. This year is going to be in preparation for a 'Travels with Charlie' trip sometime in the future --so its camping along the way, and reporting as I have energy and internet connections.

Periodic posts will appear below, latest first. The
"Pages" down at the bottom have some information of more general applicability or interest. Enjoy! HippieDave

Saturday, June 14, 2014

The birds are tweeting and I am not

It is a beautiful morning in Canton NY!  the birds are singing, it is not raining (got it all done last night) and I am sitting with a cup of joe contemplating what it will feel like to do nothing today.  I will tag along with my cousin and hubby to a community garden potluck lunch.  And we may go visit the Remmington Museum (he was a local in this area, which I did not know.)

I am absolutely thrilled to have had my first encounter with the Amish Community.  It wasn't much.  I just passed a two horse team buggy with a familiy in it, and then a bit later a two draft horse flatbed wagon piled high with grain.  I say thrilled, because -- while I do not aspire in any regard whatsoever for the austere religious community life---there is something very romantic in the throwback lifestyle of hand tools and horse drawn locomotion.  Maybe it is because I've just done 3600 miles or so on a  motorcycle that the idea of sitting on a buggy behind a beautiful matched team of horses to go into town to shop just sounds wonderful.  How do they get their ice cream home frozen though?

Talking with my cousins, I learn that the Amish have been in this area a while, and are increasing in number as their need for land expands, presumably as families grow.  Land is relatively cheap here compared to Pennsylvania.  I know  next to nothing about the Amish.  I presumed that they were home schooled, but was not aware that English is taught in schools, to varying extents, as a second language, and that they speak one of several dialects of German dating back to the 17th Century...Their 'official church' language is Hoch Deutsch, or high German.  The fact that a population (current estimates are about 250,000 nationwide) of people can more or less smoothly coexist in our society even when they hold such dramatically different beliefs and cultural practices from the rest of us speaks to the flexibility and strength of our system.  It is surely a difference to be honored and respected.

I wonder if there's a place I could buy an Amish hat...they are really cool.

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