Amish Country - Via the ‘Factory tour capital of the world’

Birds in Amish country
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After driving a few hundred miles to reach Amish land, crossing two state borders and stopping in at the ‘factory tour capital of the world’, we finally arrived in the land of the Amish to hunt down the quilt of Emma’s dreams!

Let me fill you in on the journey first. Our first stop was in a little college town called Shepherdstown,in West Virginia. All I can say about this place is that I would move here in a second. What a cool little town! After sorting out our accommodation we headed to one of the local restaurants on the main strip (the only strip) and then caught a movie at the local movie theater which was also on the main strip (next door actually). All the college towns that we have passed through have been great but this one has stood out for me!

Typical farmhouse
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The next morning we were off again, heading up towards Pennsylvania to stay the night in Lancaster to rest up before the big shopping expedition. On the way we stopped in at the York visitors centre to get some local knowledge on the whole Amish thing. What made this visitors centre a little different was that it also doubled as a visitors centre for the Harley-Davidson factory!! We later found out that York is known as the ‘factory tour capital of the world’! We tried to get some information from the woman at the counter on the local area but all she seemed interested in doing was signing us up for the free tour of the Harley factory. She was pretty full on and after telling us that no one would let us live it

Ditto
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down if we told them we were there and didn’t do the tour we signed on the dotted line!

The tour ended up being great and we got to see how Harleys are built from scratch, which was cool (we even got to sit on some, no pics unfortunately) but still had no idea where to stay for the night or where to get the best Amish quilts! Eventually after all that excitement we arrived in Lancaster and managed to track down another visitors centre and we were back on track.

That night for dinner we decided to really soak up the Amish atmosphere and go to a typical Amish family restaurant for dinner. If you don’t know exactly what that involves that’s fine, neither did we! We soon found out that it involved sitting at a long community (family) style table with a bunch of strangers whilst being served dinner, just as if you were at home. Sounds scary? Well it was at first but it actually ended up being pretty fun. We made some new friends, Jan and Buck, a very nice couple from Cape Cod. They were really interesting to talk to and they even gave us their number and address in case we ended up getting to Cape Cod. Jan was funny, she sort of reminded us of the chain smoking, leather tanned lady from There’s Something about Mary, in a good way of course!

The next morning we headed off on what was to be a marathon shopping expedition - I think we must have shopped for five hours straight, apart from a brief stop for lunch at the scariest diner ever, with the scariest customers thrown in for free!! We must have visited 90% of the Amish community along the way! By the end we knew the names of all the different quilt designs and could probably even speak Amish if we were really pushed. After searching all day Emma hadn’t fallen in love and we thought we may be going home empty handed but we decided to stop in at one more shop before we called it quilts, whoops sorry, I mean called it quits!

It was at Hannah’s Quilts & Crafts that we came to find the quilt of Emma’s dreams! The whole experience was perfect. The shop was located at the back of an Amish home and we were served by a little old Amish woman who would have showed us quilts until the cows came home if we wanted her to without any pressure to buy one. Anyway I’m sure that Em will fill everyone in on what it looks like but for any quilters out there it’s basically your standard nine patch multi-colour pattern with a thin border to finish it all off. Pretty impressive ay!