Insert "Intercourse" Joke Here.

Hey, if the Amish can cash in on the name of their town, why can't I, right? I mean, who knows what kind of readers are going to find their way to my blog based on the word intercourse, but hey, traffic is traffic, right?

This weeks story...

I got it in my head, when I managed to get to Toughkenamon, you know, just beyond Kennett Square and back on the scooter, that further distances were possible, especially if you used the "walking" feature on Google maps, where you indicate you want directions to where you want to go by foot than by car, thus keeping you off the interstates and such, places where my scooter and I have no business, what with the highway speeds and all that we cannot possibly reach.

So, I found out that there was going to be this small fly in of airplanes at the Smoketown Airport, not far from Lancaster, Pa. Sure enough, there was a route of back roads I could take to get there and back, all 35 miles, so I figured why not?

So the trip starts off good enough, breakfast with my friends at Penn's Table, and then riding out of town on West Strausburg Road. The problem, if one can call it a problem, is the fact that there was a bridge out in Mortonville. This led to a very nice detour through Embreeville and Unionville before getting back on track. Thank God I had the iPhone with the Google Map and GPS feature, at one point I found myself at a crossroads in the middle of nowhere, cornfields at every side, I almost expected the devil himself to come out and make me a deal so that I could play the guitar really well or something.




There's definitely a change in the topography that takes place from where we are in the cool shade of the trees that hang over the roads and over the Brandywine river to where it begins to open up to our north and west into rolling farmland and open spaces. The other sign that things are a little bit different? Horse drawn Buggies. Men in suspenders and straw hats, women with scarves on their heads and long skirts, riding the scooter through piles of horse manure on the road, yup, the Amish.



The Scooter made it perfectly to the infamously named town of Intercourse, Pennsylvania, the gateway to where the Amish cash in. Who can blame them really, between their fresh farm grown products, the quilts, the handmade quality furniture, who can't resist the desire at some point living in the Mid Atlantic states or beyond of just packing up the car and making a little road trip out to this bucolic countryside and do some shopping or ride on a buggy?



Just to cover their bases though, because surprise surprise, not every guy likes going over quilting patterns for hours and hours, right in the middle of Intercourse is the American Military Edged Weaponry Museum. I saw this place and had to stop, I mean, a military museum? How can I not? I mean, knives and pointed sticks? I mean, I can defend myself against fresh fruit, (you know, loganberries, bananas) but a bayonet in the gut? I had to check it out. 3 bucks gets you buzzed into an old bank branch complete with vault where they have display cases of every kind of knife we have ever used in wartime. They even had several versions of the knife I used in the Army, the Aircrew Survival knife, through my skilled hands many a coconut has met it's demise when we were in Key West.

So, back on the road, and after a fill up first as the scooter refused to go an inch further without some gas, we made it through Intercourse (no sex jokes, have you noticed?) and went through Bird in Hand, (that's a town, Bird in Hand, Pennsylvania) before finally making it to Smoketown.


There regular pilot folks, with regular old general aviation airplanes, not a whole lot of warbirds, or fancy schmancy airplanes, just a few classics, getting together for spot landing contests and flour bombing contests. That's right, a contest where a pilot flies 500 feet above the runway and throws out a sack of flour to hit a target below. Something I don't see every day, that's for sure!

Beriev 103 Seaplane from Russia

It seemed like controlled chaos, but somehow it worked. Airplanes took off and landed, entered the pattern, all without the aid of an Air Traffic Control tower. This is what happens when people who have a passion for something, they can make anything possible, from the flying right down to the hot dog grill.

Planes and Trains or Amtrak and Airplanes

Before long, it was time to make the reverse trip home, and it was relatively uneventful, now that I seemed to know what I was doing. The bridge being out still forced me to take another scenic detour, but honestly, every turn it seems is a new path of discovery around here, I really hope I have a chance to try them all.