Amish Country and a Rally or two

OK! I’ve been negligent in keeping up on the Blog.  That’s hard to argue and is established.  Once you get in that fix it’s just keeps getting harder and harder to correct.  As I see it, I have a couple of options.  I can buckle down and promise myself to write all of the things I was going to write, or I can just kind of lump the last month all together and get’er done.  The first option is what got me where I am.  Been there, done that, so to speak.  Besides, you already figured from the title of this post that I had picked option number two.  Sooo……………

Back to Indiana and Amish country.

The Gypsy Journal Rally was in Elkhart.  Really, we just went because it was between where we were and where we were going.  That is, it was between Ohio and the Escapade in Goshen, IN, just down the road from Elkhart, IN.  So we signed up.  It was good, and smaller than the others, but by this time we had seen most of what we wanted to see in a Rally and we still had the Escapade to go.  But, before that we had a few days in Shipshewana, IN.  Shipshe, as some say, might be the heart of Amish Country.  Certainly it is by buggy count and the amount of horse crap on the side of the road.  But the food is good and the flea market was big and the Amishnish (my word) make it a little different than the flea markets in the Rio Grande Valley and Yuma.  What was really different was the stuff in the big True Value hardware store.  All kinds of stuff for use that required no electricity.  Cider presses, stoves, big pots and cast iron cookware.  I wish I could remember more. But it was unique. 

So then it was the Escapade in Goshen.  This was a first for us and we had looked forward to it for a while.  Escapees is a first class RV institution.  We go to their RV parks, use the mail service, subscribe to the magazine and newsletter.  Neither Kat or I are real ‘joiners’ but if you wanted to pick an outfit that emphasized belonging it would be the Escapees.  And certainly by lifestyle, we are SKIPS.  So to the National Escapade we went.  We got a real primo site there.  There we are. Jade liked it!  And the real neat thing was the craft hall.  I spent most of my time in the craft hall with the woodcarvers and Kat got started in beading.  Kat asked if I was getting all the highlights of the rallies in my Blog.  I said, highlights?  She said yeah, highlights!!  Like I was being a little negative or something.  OK, sorry!  Maybe I was. I think she gets it right when she says they were all good.  The Fleetwood Rally was first and informative and we were pumped.  The Grand National Rally was the place to spend your money on stuff. Vendors of all kinds, shapes, and sizes.  The Gypsy Journal was smaller and probably had a greater proportion of folks like us than any of the others. Real fulltime gypsies.  And if you wanted to learn something, the Escapade was the place to be.  But there is a ‘but’!  We wouldn’t do them all at once again.  That was just a little too much and where my negativity was creeping in.