Amishland

Today Alyson and I decided to have a little adventure, so we drove about 30 miles north of Charleston to a little town named Tuscola, Illinois. It's home to Flesor's Candy Kitchen, which supposedly has some of the best hand-dipped candy in the U. S. They have a cute little restaurant there, so we ate lunch (I had a Philly cheese steak sandwich) and tried one of the maple pecan chocolates. They have bread pudding there, but I did get a little bread puddinged-out in Mississippi, and no one, not even Felsor's, could have as good of bread pudding as you can find in Mississippi, so I figured that if I had bread pudding and it wasn't up to par with that from the South, it would just make me miss the South even more! So I stuck with a chocolate. They also had yummy fountain drinks there too. On our way back, we stopped at this gigantic red barn that said "AMISHLAND" on the roof. Inside it was a huge village of Amish shops. I had never seen anything quite like that before. I found some tasty-looking apple butter to buy. Next to Amishland is an outlet mall, and as Alyson and I were driving through the parking lot, she said, "Is that a horse and buggy?" I looked over to the far end of the lot, and sure enough, there was a horse parked next to a street lamp, hooked up to a buggy. Can Amish people shop at outlet stores? I guess they can--because I don't know who else the horse would have belonged too. A horse parked in a parking lot just isn't something you see every day, but it was kind of fun. A good thunderstorm blew through as we were driving back to Charleston, and it looked really pretty with the dark clouds out over the miles and miles of corn fields. The rain even cooled things off a little, so that was good! Alyson and I have decided that we're going to try to do fun things on the weekends, like go to the fall festivals in surrounding communities. Fall festivals seem to abound in this area, so that should help the fall season fly by quite quickly. Well, I've got to go read a lot of stuff to prepare for school on Monday, so I'll sign out for now. If anyone ever decides they need any oak furniture or anything like that, I could hook you up with the people at Amishland. Oh, and I almost forgot--the party punks were at it again last night, but at least it didn't last as long as the night before. Alyson and I snuck out of the apartment to go find the exact location of the noise, and even though we previously thought it was coming from the apartment below us, we pinpointed it as the apartment right above us. We'll have to talk with someone about that.