Quick Road Trip

Henry, Bea and I decided to meet up with our friends Christi and River for a couple days out in Amish Country this weekend. Christi found the most awesome Mennonite family on couchsurfers.com who let us stay at their place for free and even fed us dinner and breakfast. We learned a ton about them and their life and surely made some lifetime friends:) They had three darling daughters who were just the age of our kids and Henry had fun reading and coloring with them. One thing they did that we wanted to adopt into our daily routine is singing songs before eating dinner. That was really fun. I totally regret, though, that we didn't get a photo with our host family! Anyway, thanks to Ernie, Elmina, Evelyn, Erica and Emily for your generosity.

To keep Henry happy on the drive out there I told him we were going to the world's largest pet store and when we got there we found a gigantic rabbit and lots of really cool reptiles. Henry loved it. While we were in the area, we basically hit all the places we could find that had anything to do with food. The Amish stores out there give out samples of everything they make so we found ourselves not even needing to buy much food because we snacked all day long. On Friday we went to Lititz, PA to tour a chocolate factory with an museum of antique chocolate making items and then got a tip about a pretzel factory just up the road, which was the first place to commercially sell pretzels in the nation and I finally found out how to make pretzels! If you want to know, you have to check out hohlfoods.blogspot.com. They let us roll out dough. showed us the antique brick ovens and then we ate samples of all their interesting flavors. My favorite was pretzels with a hint of cinnamon sugar baked right into the dough so it wasn't really desert-like, but you could still taste it. I was also inspired to make peanut butter topped pretzels covered in dark chocolate. They were really expensive so I'm just going to make them. Yum!

On Saturday we spent time in Intercourse(yes I know you're giggling)going to the touristy places, eating more samples and freezing our fingers off. Henry in particular didn't want to wear his gloves or his hat so after about an hour, he was crying from the cold. I hope he learns his lesson about bundling up! We were also noticeably younger than the average tourist, like 20 to 30 years younger, and we had a hard time moving from place to place without having to show our babies off to all the elderly folk. Henry especially loved the petting zoo where they had a llama, miniature goats, sheep, horses and chickens(not miniature, though that would be totally cute). We decided that it was too cold and so we headed up to Hershey, PA for yet another food adventure and spent our last hours there. Most of what's there at Hershey is free, but we splurged and went on the trolley tour of the town to see the Hershey's kiss street lamps and the Hershey mansion. Henry met Santa Claus and didn't freak out, which was good, and got a little ornament from him. We left in a gigantic blizzard and found our cars covered in at least two inches of snow, but it stopped as soon as we got on the road, thank heaven. Then it was a long four hour drive home in the dark. Yea for Amish Country. I love eastern PA.