I’d read an article about this before, but here’s a new one, especially for those under the impression that the Amish don’t travel unless by horse and buggy:
(It’s a really nice article – well worth your time)
Friends and relatives greet the new arrivals with hugs and shrieks of delight. As in the most discriminating resorts, everyone dresses alike: The women wear prayer caps; the men, barn-door britches held up by suspenders. There are no bikinis or Bermuda shorts; no boom boxes or beer bottles.
In a long, lazy line, they trickle down the sun-splattered streets, lugging pillows and suitcases, their farmhouse fashions a kooky counterpoint to this modern oasis of whitewashed homes and wind-blown palm trees.
Welcome to Pinecraft, a little-known getaway for the horse-and-buggy set that defies their somber stereotype.
In fact, so many Amish travel south for the winter, Dave Swartzentruber decided to start a bus line.
“We used to rent out 15-passenger vans,” Swartzentruber says. “The Amish would rent the van and then hire a non-Amish person to drive it. I got to thinking, My goodness, there’s a lot of people going to Florida. I could buy a bus and haul them back and forth.'”
Every Wednesday afternoon, a 50-passenger Pioneer Trails motor coach pulls out of the parking lot of Mary Yoder’s Amish Kitchen in Middlefield. The bus picks up more low-tech tourists in the parking lots of restaurants, post offices and grocery stores in Hartville, Sugarcreek, Berlin, Mount Hope, Wooster, Columbus and Cincinnati. Then it rolls onto Interstate 75 for the 17-hour ride to Pinecraft. There is a one-hour stop for breakfast at the Cracker Barrel restaurant in Tifton, Georgia. A second Pioneer Trails bus makes a weekly Wednesday run through Indiana, picking up Amish snowbirds in towns such as Nappanee, Middlebury and Shipshewana
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