OHIO - BERLIN

Our last full day of sightseeing was spent in Ohio. We really wanted to go to an Amish area and so we visited Berlin and Millersburg in Holmes County.

We were looking for a particular restaurant that we had read about in the LPG but couldn't find it. We stopped at a kind of general store (where Nic tried her first corn dog which are hotdogs in corn bread, I love corn bread, corn muffins, corn dogs......) and then went for a bit of a drive looking for the Amish and Mennonite Museum that the LPG had also mentioned. We ended up stumbling across it by accident.

The tour was given to us by a volunteer at the Museum whose named was Krist (not sure how that is spelt so have just gone with the phonetic version) and started with a 15 minute video talking about the Amish and Mennonites and the different orders there are. Like old order Amish, new order Amish etc. which basically differentiated how strict they were. We then went into a round room that had a cyclorama painted in it. It took the artist 16 years to complete and is extremely detailed. It tells the story of the Amish and Mennonite history and Krist walked us through it, explaining as he went.

After the cyclorama we went through a typical Amish school house and a barn. The school house is old and had been relocated to the museum grounds. The barn was new but was built in the traditional Amish way. Completely of wood. There are no nails but it is built in a way similar to how furniture used to be, using dowels where nails, bolts or screws would normally be (they were called something else but a dowel is what they are similar to).

We also got a look at a buggy and the roads in the area even have a buggy lane similar to our bike lanes. Nic and I were the only ones on the tour so we got to talk to Krist about a lot of things. He had as many questions for us as we had for him.

A few interesting facts we learnt -

The language spoken at home is German and most Amish children don't learn English until they go to school.

Amish children finish school at grade 8 - the focus of the Amish way of life being agriculture - whereas Mennonite children often go to University.

Being Amish is a way of life not a religion - the Amish are Christians.

We learnt a lot more but they are the facts that I remember correctly.

Our plan for the rest of the day (well it was 4pm when we left so not much of the day was actually left) was to drive until we were tired and then find somewhere to sleep. In the morning we would drive the last few hours to get back to Sybil's house in New Jersey for our last night together before Nic flew to L.A.

So anyway, early in our trip Nic asked why we didn't just drive at the end of each day and stop when we got tired. I explained that I prefer to have a night or two booked ahead of time. This way we know we have someone to stay, we know what we are paying and it keeps us on track time wise in the scheme of the whole trip. Nic found this a bit stressful but as I tended to do the searching and booking of the places she agreed to do it that way. Anyway on this last night in a motel I agreed that we should just drive until we felt tired and look for somewhere but that she had to be the one to find the place and sort out prices.

She agreed. The pressure was on.

And I think there came a time where she started to feel the pressure. The thing is we normally see heaps of signs on the side of the freeways for places to stay. Absolutely heaps of them. This time when we started to feel like we were ready to stop, there was nothing.

Paul rang to say hi to her and she asked him to call back in half an hour because - although we thought we would have been at a hotel by that time - we hadn't found anywhere.

So Paul called back later.

We were still driving. Still looking.

Eventually, much to Nicola's relief, not to mention mine, we saw a sign for an exit that had accommodation. It wasn't until later we found out that the reason there wasn't sign after sign of motels and the fact that it was pitch dark outside with no lights to be seen, was because we had been driving through a huge mountain range. And when I say huge, I mean one big enough that it runs all the way up into Canada.

Nic's plan was that she would go to the first one we found and be happy with whatever it was. (One of the reasons I didn't want to travel so randomly was because I didn't want to have to drive to a bunch of motels each night before we found something suitable). The first one was called Motel 6. Not a very promising name but we had stayed at one called Super 8 which had turned out to be fine, so we couldn't base it on a name. She waited in reception and then waited some more but no-one came. So she decided to go next door to the Best Western and if that didn't work out we were coming back to the Motel 6.

No going from motel to motel for us - thank goodness.

Luckily for Nicola the person on the desk not only gave us a discount for having AAA (kind of like RAVC), she also found a coupon for us. She told her she would rather give us a cheaper price than have us go back to the other one as there were often police and drug dealers up there.

Apparently.

Needless to say Nic was pretty happy with herself.

Me? I was just happy we hadn't done it this way every night.