Pennsylvania, Ohio OHMY

Yesterday we cruised down the highway along Lake Erie for many miles. We left Niagara Falls, of course we got turned around one more time before we could get away, but it was relatively painless. I tell ya, there's an energy vortex there, sucks you back in...

We dropped into western PA, after we stopped on the beach of Lake Erie. It was a nature preserve, and had a nice boardwalk out to the beach. It was a nice sandy beach, but it had a big pile of debris about 10 foot tall. It was hard to overlook, and as I walked by, I thought there was a lot of crud that had washed on shore. Then I looked closer, and realized there was snow under the dirt crust. 10 feet of snow on the beach! It had been scooped up into a big pile, dirt, leaves and all. That really brought home to me how cold it had been, and I had a flash of what the shore had looked like just a few weeks before. As I walked down to the water, I could see the far shoreline, and realized I was again looking at Canada across the water. It was pretty cool.

We spent the night somewhere in PA. I found a State Park on a lake, and we stopped there for a couple hours. The Canadian geese were flying north just overhead. A few landed on the lake, and we enjoyed watching them skimming the surface, honking at their friends. It was like they were calling for the rest to join them. I realized again how much I missed the geese and other birds flying over us in Colorado. It was a regular event, spring and fall, the geese would fly in formation as they moved back and forth across the continent. We lived a couple miles north of the Colorado river, and the geese would stop there as they traveled. When they started honking, often our geese would honk back, and look like they wanted to take off with the wild bunch.

Today we drove through Ohio Amish country. We drove into Walnut Creek, looking for a good restaurant and a place to park. We found a parking lot, adjacent to 3 horse-and-carriages, parked in their own spot. The grocery store had a place on the side of it that said "Carriage parking only", with horse poo splatted on the pavement as proof! An Amish couple climbed out of their carriage and walked down the street. I had my camera, but suddenly felt it would be invasive to take their picture without permission. I got a few shots of the horses, and once the couple were at the end of the driveway, facing away from me, I took a picture of the horses with them in the background. I bet it gets old to be the focus of all the tourists every day, but the people I met didn't seem to mind much.

We had lunch at an Amish restaurant, and pie; I had chocolate cream, Mom had strawberry, before we drove on down the road. We also found a cheese factory, where they use locally produced milk. It was all Amish-run, wonderfully organic cheese and other items. There were horse-drawn carriages running up and down the roads, squeezed against the side by all the cars and trucks whizzing by. I saw teens driving most of the time, seemingly unfazed by the masses of cars on the road. The farms are immaculate, with great big barns. We saw a man plowing a field with a draft horse, it was pretty cool.

Tonight we are in Zanesville, OH. Mom's getting an oil change at the local Ford dealer tomorrow, and I'm dragging her to the local library and maybe to the courthouse to check for records. My Grandma was a Cramblit, and her great-grandfather lived in this county for years, from 1830-1850's, so I want to see what kind of genealogy records I can find. I'm in full genealogy mode now, and hope to find some interesting things while we're here.