Lancaster Heart of the Amish

Well its been a while since the last update, a little over 2 weeks in fact and as you can guess, i am back home again, ive been here now since late Friday night and tomorrow i should be out again. im still without a camera as the kodak is irrepairable and i cant decide which one to get next, also the google map feature is temporaraly out of comission as the home computer has commited suicide. That hasnt been replaced yet either as we cant decide what to replace it with, i think we will be creating and office in one of the spare rooms and get a desktop, that way its a place to keep the dining room table free of laptops and wires and a space where Luke can go and study and do homework. On a selfish note i quite fancy getting a large widescreen monitor as its so much easy to read the Forex charts.

My last little jaunt took me down almost into Philidelphia which was great coz it took me straight through the heart of Amish country. Over in Europe you may not be too familiar with this comunity, they are a simple folk who shun modern technology, they only use horse drawn or manual equipment on their farms and use horse drawn buggies instead of cars and trucks.

Due to their simple life and reclusive nature they dont tend to stand out on the American demogaphic maps but their center of existance (or their Zion if you like) is Pensylvania and particularly around the town of Lancaster.

I only took an interest in them from a book i once read by Stephen King called "From a Buik 8".
Fantastic book, have a read of it if you get the chance.

They sprung into the limelight a couple of years ago when there were a series of murders in the community, apparently a local nutter murdered a group of Amish girls in a school, very nasty and sad affair, and the amazing thing was the very tolerant way that the Amish comunity reacted.

An easy readable account can be found here http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/10/07/AR2006100700394_pf.html

Anyway after making my delivery i shuttled over into New Jersey to pick up my collection, then i headed north int Montreal. This was a quick turnaround and soon i was heading West towards Alberta, at least i was till i got a message to do a trailer swap in Nipigon ON and head back to Toronto. By the time i got to Toronto i had run out of hours so i reset and 36 hours later i was heading westwards again. I made pretty good time and it took me just under 3 days to get back to Alberta, i got back around midnight on the Friday.

Its been pretty busy since i got home and i pretty much havent stopped, everything seems to have built up so Saturday it was running around town, Saturday night was another fantastic meal in the Montanas Cookhouse http://www.montanas.ca/eng/menu_home.php

Sunday was spent work clothes shopping (i needed new jeans), chopping up 24 pallets for firewood and bottling 46 liters of falling down juice, thats 23 liters of cider and 23 liters of a premium brown ale. Also we put another 46 liters into the primary fermentors, this time 23 liters of cider (we like cider) and 23 liters of India pale Ale, once that goes into the secondary fermentation tanks (carboys) then there will be another 23 liters of cider being started and also a very cheeky little Mexican style lager. Why so much i here you ask, well its all about maturity.....

No not mine..................

Once the beer or cider is bottled then the carbonation takes place which gives the brew its fizz and this is done at the fermenting temperature of between 18 - 24 degrees, these bottles are then moved to a cooler darker place where they sit and age, this is especially important for the darker beers and the cider and i am hoping to keep it for about 9 months.........

We'll see.............................................