The Trots!

We weren't  quite prepared for all the buggies in Pennsylvania. We headed up to Lancaster County to stay over for a trail race and everywhere we went there were buggies going up and down the highways. We'd seen them in films, etc but when you're driving along and suddenly there they are all over the place it's quite something. There are one horse buggies, two horse buggies and buggy coaches - in the fields they're muckspreading with waggons pulled by draught (draft!) horses and so on. The reason of course is the fact that this part of the States is full of Amish (grey buggies) and Mennonites (black buggies). They don't have cars, electricity or TV's but they can use batteries so they are able to have flashing indicators so you know when they're turning right or left. It appears that their farms are the most productive per acre in the whole of the USA. There's a thing!

Don't do this in high heels!

The Amish don't use bicycles either but they do ride scooters and several times we passed grey whiskered old chaps furiously pushing themselves uphill on these special scooters - some of the Amish oldsters are apparently dabhands with skateboards as well but we didn't catch a glimpse of any of them. As we pulled into Lancaster city itself Vicky mentioned to me that alcohol is forbidden and I had a bit of a panic - however we found a couple of fine brewpubs in town so we were saved! An excellent friendly place was Lancaster and we thoroughly enjoyed the rolling hills and the fertile fields around and about - the smallish farmsteads were immaculately kept - very impressive!

Early Sunday morning (even before the Mennnites and Amish got up for church) we found our way to the start of the Dirty Bird 15K Trail Race. Nearly 400 runners gathered at the French Creek State Park and galloped through the forest trails. And dirty it was too - the trails were icy and slushy - just my kind of race and I managed to appear at the finish as first V60 in a time of 83.25 (31st overall). In compensation for my titanic efforts I came home with an enormous XXXL T shirt (in the US even the XL's are too big for me so you can imagine that it looks like a dress on me - however that was all they had left) plus they also gave me a big golden turkey trophy to try and squeeze in my suitcase.

We'll get you there!

The following day was the most fraught that we've had so far. Carefully laid plans started to unravel - we aimed back to Philadelphia to drop our hire car at the Amtrak central station in plenty of time to catch our scheduled train to Baltimore airport for our flight to Charlotte, North Carolina. Despite leaving with lots of buffer time we hit rush hour traffic in the city, missed a turning and found ourselves in a part of town that looked like the worst areas of Detroit. So we missed our prebooked train, caught the next one (paid more for the change than we had for the whole of the first tickets) and found ourselves at the airport with less than half an hour to go. I thought blow it - the man at the first class counter wasn't doing anything else so I dashed up to him and bless his cotton socks (a Maryland expression I believe) he got us through and we clambered on board. (Don't try this at home!!)