Can We Get A Witness?

So that’s how they really do it… on our 68-mile ride from Shipshewana, IN to Fort Wayne, IN today, we rode away from the Amish town set up for the tourists, and witnessed some of the Amish in their day to day activities. It started when Kat asked an Amish guy at the gas station with a battery on the back powering his bike whether it charged up by dynamo as he pedalled along. He looked slightly bemused and then said quite plainly “No, I plug it into the mains at night”. And forget all that “pimp my carriage” stuff that we saw on Saturday with the tinted windows on the horse-drawn carriage. Today, we saw a couple of Amish guys in a Ford F-350, moving some farming equipment around! Still, we remain in favour of the whole thing. We had such a peaceful rest day, and everyone seemed so happy, it was pretty infectious.

It was a great day’s cycling through the farm roads and lanes of Indiana. The temperature was up there in the 80s but we were breathing a huge sigh of relief for the reduced humidity and the tail wind. Talking of which, as we rolled into the small town of Huntertown, we spotted Mike on the other side of the road, a lone tourist doing his own version of the Northern Tier from East to West … we haven’t seen many (if any) of those type around here… he must be getting a headwind every day, and we can’t even think about how he is going to feel about North Dakota. Reminds us a bit of ourselves on the Southern Tier!

Tonight we’re in one of Indiana’s big cities: Fort Wayne. It was pretty busy getting here in rush hour, and we’re hoping that our departure tomorrow morning will be a bit less frenetic. We had a good meal at a Ft Wayne institution tonight, Henry’s, just a few blocks from our B&B. Somehow our bodily cells, starved of alcohol for the last 2 days, found themselves soaking up the white wine like sponges, and before we knew it, we were 2 bottle of unoaked chardonnay down. Oops.

Oh well, we’ll be ready to face tomorrow’s ride into Ohio once we’ve had a hearty breakfast…

Us x