Blue Ball And Intercourse

Note: I was busy writing all day and ran out of time, so here is a blog post from our fulltime RVing days about some uniquely named Pennsylvania communities.

No, that’s not a reference to my sex life. Blue Ball and Intercourse are two communities in Lancaster County, the heart of the Pennsylvania Dutch country. 

We spent yesterday playing tourist and getting to know this beautiful area of Pennsylvania a little better. Our first stop was in Lancaster to do some banking and then we drove through Circle M Outdoor World Resort to check it out. In addition to the Hershey Thousand Trails preserve, our membership gives us three more preserves in this area, Circle M in Lancaster, Pennsylvania Dutch Country in Manheim, and Gettysburg Farm in Dover. We haven’t checked out Gettysburg Farm yet, but of the others, our favorites so far are Hershey and Pennsylvania Dutch Country. Circle M looked nice, and it was clean and well maintained, but there was nothing special about it.

From there, we drove to Bird In Hand, another small Amish town we discovered on our first trip through the area several years ago. We always enjoy poking through the Old Village Store, where they have everything from Amish souvenirs to antiques, and a lot of things you won’t find at your local Walmart. Need a butter churn, a roll of flypaper, or some Fels Naptha soap? They’ve got it, along with washboards, straw hats, and cane fishing poles.

We also stopped at Labadie Looms so Terry could drool over all of the yarns and fibers they had on display, as well as several models of looms. Donna Beaver, the nice lady who owns the store, is a direct descendant of Lege de la Bouchelle, a French Huguenot who arrived in the Colonies in 1683 with a Pietist group known as the Labadists. We had a nice visit with Donna, and she shared a lot of information on weaving with us and gave Terry some good tips.

Our next stop was Intercourse. Someone asked me how the town got its name, and I suggested that maybe when the settlers were trying to choose a name, somebody got frustrated and said, “Screw it!” That’s probably not the way it actually happened, but that’s my story, and I’m sticking to it.

It’s harvest time, and we stopped to admire this orchard as an Amish family was picking apples.

We drove through Blue Ball (all I can think of is a Smurf who experienced a horrible injury) and stopped for dinner at the Shady Maple Smorgasbord, which is kind of like a buffet on steroids. They have a huge selection for any appetite and by the time we were finished we could barely waddle out to the parking lot.

The sites here at the Hershey Thousand Trails are not very level, and the only way we could get level was to have the front tires off the ground, which we don’t like to do. So we have been listing to the driver’s side since we got here. We think that is part of the reason we have had such a bad leak in all of the rain we’ve had. The water seems to channel down to a small gap in our bedroom slide seal and right inside. So we stopped at a Lowe’s on the way home and bought an eight-foot-long pressure-treated 2×10 and had them cut it into 16-inch lengths. Back at the campground I extended the jacks to get the wheels off the ground, we put the wood under the front tires and let the jacks back down, and we’re level. Hopefully, that will help until it dries out enough to let us caulk the hole. Which may be a while, because today we’re supposed to have more rain.

It was a fun day, and I’m feeling rejuvenated and ready to get back to work on the new issue. Only five pages to go!

Thought For The Day – If there is a way to read a woman’s mind, I wouldn’t want to. I hate shopping, gossip, and cats, and I already know how annoying I am.