Next day we caught the train to Philadelphia. Countryside was mostly light industrial outer suburban and not that interesting. Next day we hired a car and drove a couple of hours to the Amish area near Lancaster. The Amish are an extremist offshoot of the Mennonites who believe that politics and religion should never be mixed. A lot of them emigrated from Protestant Northern Germany / Flemish regions during the 18^th century when Penn (as in Pennsylvania) promised them freedom of beliefs. The area has a lot of Mennonites too, who seem to be a little more like the Jehovah Witness. The Amish do not hook up to the electricity grid, have no mechanized conveyances like push bikes, but scooters and roller blades (the girl in the foreground) and billy carts are OK. The men have Abraham Lincoln beards (no moustache) and the women wear plain long dresses with their hair tied up in little gauze bonnets. The women with the pusher was at one of the 2 huge discount outlet centers where they have space for horse and carts to be tied up.

There is plenty of commerce going on between the Amish and normal folk / tourists.

We drove up to this farm house where they were selling very nice root beer (sarsaparilla), jams and strawberries. There was a single cylinder put-put motor driving some machinery in one of the sheds – it seems motors are OK, as long as they are not for moving you around. In the scene below where a horse drawn mower is cutting hay, the cutters are driven by a put-put motor.