Pennsylvania

I never really got beyond NYC in my travelogue - but the sticker art I included in the post-before-last was from the second part of my visit which was in Pennsylvania.

I spent one day in Philadelphia.
It rained.

The rain started out gently and as it got more persistent and I decided I should, after all, fish out the umbrella from the bottom of my bag I discovered that I had brought my sun glasses. But not my umbrella.

I got thoroughly drippy wet - and therefore used my little compact camera, not the lost camera - and so I have some pictures.

So, here are my Philly street art pics:

The rain didn't really matter, I was meeting up with an old friend and we had a good time.
I also ate my first philly cheese steak, which was good.

It was also large.
But I ate most of it.

My Pennsylvania stay also involved ribs



and scrapple


seen here on the plate top left of the picture - an adjunct to the hash browns and humongous omlette containing ham, cheese, crab and lots of other things I can't remember...

I was introduced to scrapple as "even better than black pudding". It wasn't. It was... okay.

So I didn't eat grits, but i did eat scrapple.
So there.

But Pennsylvania wasn't all about food (not quite).

It was wonderfully lush and rural, spring woodlands full of blossom and cornus

and farmland with, here and there, the most beautiful old barns (some of the pics I'm saddest to have lost).

We drove through and around Amish country where I learned that Amish houses can be recognised by the absence of power cables and the presence of washing lines. The dark coloured clothing - black, dark blues and purples - is a sign of an Amish family, whereas more varied and brighter washing would probably be mennonites rather than Amish.

Which was kind of interesting. Washing on a line in Britain just means.... washing to be dried!



We stopped at a yard sale across the fronts of a few Amish houses. My friend noticed that some of the women were wearing crocs, which seemed a bit incongruous. Albeit black crocs.
But she said that some Amish families do have telephones - maybe in an outhouse, to be available but not allowed to dominate - or maybe even also computers. Sometimes they borrow farming equipment from mennonite neighbours - though I did see a lot of horse-drawn ploughs out in the fields. But the point is to be self-sufficient without technology rather than luddite, - maybe to use it as a matter of choice but without being dependent on or dominated by it.

We visited a couple of shops full of the most amazing amish quilting:



I also visited:
* Ghettisburg, which was beautiful and sobering

* a huge and very shiny Harley Davidson dealership where I bought a top for LG (top as in clothing rather than anything vehicular)

* Efrata cloister - home of a community founded in the C18th, who lived an extraordinarily ascetic and strict life in the most lovely setting, in buildings which were very photogenic but probably not terribly comfortable as homes, driven by the expectation of the return of Christ for whom they sat and waited at particular hours in the daytime and also in the middle of the night. They only slept 3 hours on either side of the midnight waiting, ate only one meal a day (a very frugal meal), worked extraordinarily hard and lived rather longer than average for their era.

The women made intricate and skilfully creative woven cloth - its amazing how creativity expresses itself even where there just doesn't seem to be room for it.

* the Brandywine museum/gallery. I was so delighted with this trip - I've loved Andrew Wyeth's work since being taken to a London exhibition by a college friend, way way back in the mists of the late 70's/early 80's. Wyeth's father was a painter/illustrator, his son is also a painter - the last exhibition I saw in England featured all 3 generations, and the Brandywine museum has the major collection work from all three. We also took a tour of a local farm - Andrew Wyeth painted the building, landscapes, family over and over again. I saw this very room and window:




So - thats highlights and a few pics. from Pennsylvania.

Long post.
Sorry.
Catching up.