Posts From Pennsylvania

Today we ventured off the back roads of the North Eastern USA and onto some major freeways on our way to Oak Grove Campground in Hatfied, PA where we will stay for a few days as a base to see some of the sights of Philadelphia.

How do you visit and see the downtown area of a big city like Philadelphia when you travel around in a big yellow truck. This is a question that has occupied our minds a lot as we have thought about how we will travel in Europe. The answer we have arrived at is to park/camp outside the city and become foot (or more accurately public transport) tourists for the day. Today was our first opportunity to put this plan into practice. So just after 8:00am this morning we drove the beast from the campground to the local train station and boarded one of the SEPTA trains for a 50 minute journey into the center of Philly. That was easy and the day continued in that vein.

The latest hurricane got us today with heavy rain off and on all day. Between (and some times during) the heavy showers I spent some time crawling around and under the engine of the truck tracing wires. Why you might ask. Well we had a momentary electrical failure a few days ago that I was trying to explain. The burned wire in my hand in the picture below is the evidence and the culprit was an un-insulated connector.

Today we visited the towns of Intercourse, Paradise and Bird-In-Hand Pennsylvania to take a closer look (and learn a little) about the Amish people (no, I don't know the origin of those names but thankfully I did manage to resist making school-boy jokes about them). But to be honest we became more perplexed the more we heard about the Amish way of life. For example we saw many horse carriages with steel tired wheels running down the highway and were told that the Amish are not allowed to use motor vehicles or vehicles with rubber wheels. But when we visited an Amish farm we saw modern tractors, modern fork lifts and a variety of rubber tired trailers and trollies.