Living Our Dream: Winding Down in Amish Country

October 16, 2013

Winding Down in Amish Country

Berlin, OH - Events of Friday, October 11 to Wednesday, October 16, 2013

As we neared the end of our time in Ohio's Amish Country, we wanted to have the breakfast buffet at Der Dutchman one more time, so we headed there on Friday morning. The weather forecast was calling for beautiful weather through Saturday, and we could already tell it was going to be a busy tourist weekend in Berlin because the campground started filling up around Wednesday. The restaurant was also more crowded than it was when we were there on the previous Friday, and that was another sign it was going to be a busy weekend.

Margery was tempted to have the pumpkin pancakes that were on the menu for October, but we both ended up having the breakfast buffet.

Paul ready to dig in

After breakfast, we needed to make another stop at Walnut Creek Cheese to pick up some chicken we forgot to get when we were there a couple of days prior. We also stopped again at Winesburg Meats for more smoked sausage patties and beef snack sticks for the freezer.

After that, we made our way to the Holmes County Flea Market, which is the closest of the two area flea markets. It is so close we can see it from our site at Scenic Hills.

View of Holmes County Flea Market from Scenic Hills RV Park

Both the area flea markets have mostly new merchandise. There are a lot of decorative items, most of which have a country theme, and quite a few hand made crafts. Paul especially liked the cane shaped like a hand saw shown in the next photo. He hopes he never needs a cane, but if he does, he wants one of these.

Cane shaped like a hand saw

After the flea market, we headed back to the motor home to relax the rest of the day. On Saturday, we went to Walmart to stock up on a few groceries prior to our scheduled Monday departure.

There is an antique mall, a craft mall and an assortment of other small stores in a shopping area right across the main road from the campground. One of the shops is Ms. Gadgets, which sells kitchen accessories. We need new place mats, so headed over there after lunch to see if they had anything we might like. The main road was wall-to-wall traffic in both directions, so we decided walk.

Ms. Gadgets kitchen accessories

Unfortunately, they didn't have any place mats, but Margery enjoyed looking at some of the kitchen gadgets. Some were very clever, but many were also very specialized. When you live in an RV, you need to make do with things that serve multiple functions to save weight and space, so we escaped without buying anything.

Margery checking out kitchen gadgets

Our original plan was to leave Berlin on Monday and begin heading south. The reason for that was we expected the weather to be turning considerably colder by that time. Having been born and raised nearby in Pittsburgh, we knew there is a good chance there will be at least a light frost by the first week of October. However, this year, the highs have been in the 60s and 70s and the lows have been in the 40s and 50s the whole time we were in Berlin. Late Sunday afternoon, the warmer than usual weather combined with how much we like being in Berlin caused us to to rethink our plans to leave on Monday. We decided to stay in Berlin a few days longer - even if it meant we had to change sites at the campground.

We headed down to the office bright and early on Monday morning. Fortunately, our site was available for three more nights, which is exactly how long we wanted to stay, so we didn't even have to move.

Around mid-morning on Monday, Paul decided to drive down to Keim Lumber in the nearby town of Charm just to have a look around their huge selection of hardware, tools and specialty items.

Keim Lumber

Keim Lumber is a big home and building center that caters to DIYers and professionals alike. Paul especially likes to look around their selection of exotic hardwoods.

Paul checking out some of the exotic hardwoods

In addition to woods from all over the world, they also have special slabs of burls and other highly-prized, figured wood. The slabs in the next photo are 2 to 3 inches thick and 5 to 6 feet long. The cheapest Paul saw was domestic walnut for $700, and prices ranged all the way up to to around $6,000. The one in the front of the stack in the next photo is curly koa from Hawaii. It was $4,600.

Slabs of highly-figured wood

Slabs set up to demonstrate their use as tables

We relaxed around the campground on Tuesday. Wednesday was a dreary, rainy day, but we ran a few errands. Afterward, we relaxed around the motor home and did a few of our pre-daparture chores prior to heading south the following morning. We'll tell you where we went in our next post.

Posted on October 16, 2013 | Permalink