Amish Target, Whoopie Pies, and Outdated Phrases

For those of you faithful friends who have been reading my blog very long at all, you know that methinks that living near DC is peachy keen. Museums, memorials, and historical sites are aplenty and drive a mere couple hours away in any direction and you can find a whole new batch of places to visit.

When we lived in Baltimore (when Spencer was knee high to a grasshopper), sometimes my friends and I would take our children up for little "playdates" in Amish country. Just betwixt you and me, our kids didn't really ever play, but us Moms used to have fun talking, eating fresh baked goodies from an Amish bakery, and then buying postcards (jeepers, weren't we wild?). On our way home we would stop by a little post office to drop off our postcards. For some reason that little teeny tiny post office in Intercourse, Pennsylvania has an extraordinarily high number of letters pass through it each year.

When Glen returned from his long trip overseas on Thursday, he came home with ants in his pants wanting to take full advantage of his day off on Friday. I have to admit that I was also gaily looking forward to escaping the house after two weeks of being a slave to it. So after we met with the contractors on Friday, we thence spontaneously decided to take a quick trip up to Hershey, Pennsylvania in hopes to find fun, relaxation, and lots of chocolate!

Before we left we did a little bit of research, found a hotel, got directions to Hershey Park and to the chocolate factory, and picked out a few Amish sites to visit. When we woke up Saturday morning to buckets and buckets of rain, our best laid plans had to change and we decided to forgo Hershey Park and go to Amish country first in hopes that it would clear up later.

The kids didn't even remember ever having been there before and they were fascinated by the wide open farmland and all the horses and buggies along the way.

Our first stop was a cute little bakery/quilt shop in the middle of nowhere. We had fun ogling over the thousand dollar quilts and finally bought some whoopie pies there (a treat the Amish are famous for).

I thought they looked an awful lot like my homemade Oreo cookies, which are made with a chocolate cake mix, but I figured that since we were buying them from an Amish bakery that surely they must be more authentic than that.

My homemade Oreos looking suspiciously like the Amish baked whoopie pies above.

But after we left the shop to take a couple of kids to the potty, we noticed this in the window....

Golly gee whiz! It was case after case of Betty Crocker cake mixes completely covering 2 of the windows. That just chapped my hide seeing evidence of the fact Amish bakers like to save time too.

After that disappointing experience with the Amish bakery, we were nigh off to the "Amish Farm and House" where our hopes were high for a little Amish authenticity.

The website for this place (perhaps the fact that it had a website should have been our first warning) shows these two pictures...

and brags, "Explore the area's only authentic Amish site. It's where today touches history."

Heavens to Betsy. When they said, "Today touches history", we didn't realize they meant that literally.

For crying out loud, now I'm wondering if I should buy a horse and buggy and put a sign up in front of my house that says,

"I make whoopie pies and use old-fashioned phrases, therefore I am Amish. Slip me a couple of twenties and I'll don a bonnet and sell you my JC Penney quilts."

Kudos to the person who can write the most creative comment using their own old-fashioned phrases...