Time traveling in Ohio

One need not procure a machine off the internet to travel through time, one needs only to drive two hours in any direction from Bowling Green, Ohio. In a relatively short space of time, one may engage with the 300-or-so years of recorded history in the area and many millenia of unrecorded history where artifacts and earthworks whisper of the past.

To celebrate Michelle's **th birthday (20 Sept) and Jessica's 13th (21 Sept), we took a road trip through Holmes County, Ohio's Amish country. The day was full of meat and cheese tasting--and buying, of course--at Guggisberg and Heini's, pastoral scenes of 10-cow farms, friendly merchants selling the fruits of their labor, horse-drawn enclosed black carriages, folks speaking German, and family-friendly good times. Amish carriages at the Holmes County Home:

Carriages share the roads with automobiles, in some places there are secondary (depending on your perspective they may be considered primary) networks of roads exclusively for carriages.

Rolling hills dotted with family farms are the way of life in Holmes County: Amish farmers typically milk fewer than 10 cows each morning and transport the sweet milk to dairies and cheese factories in steel milk cans in the back of horse-drawn carriages. These two photos were taken outside Heini's Cheese Chalet in Bunker Hill, Ohio:

After a full day of sightseeing and cheese tasting, the best way to finish was with a nice dinner of chicken, roast beef, sauerkraut and sausages, potatoes, noodles, and dressing at the Farmstead Amish restaurant in Berlin. This is a picture of Emily and Jessica posing with the horses outside at the restaurant hitching rail:Looking into the restaurant as it was closing for the night (around 8:00 PM).

NC