Travel Blog

Sunday afternoon in Sarasota we drove to the Amish neighborhood of Pinecraft. I had heard about the Amish community in the city, and we had seen girls in white hair bonnets on bicycles downtown, but I had never explored the area.

As we expected, the businesses were closed, but the streets were animated with people riding large, three-wheeled cycles – the men in beards and black hats, the women in long dresses and white bonnets. The one-story houses often had cycles parked in front, a few had laundry drying on a line. They were small and close together, like in a compound, with tiny front yards and very few trees. Here and there a circle of people sat on a side porch. Sunday visiting. Occasionally a woman in a dark dress, her face to the sun, stretched on a chaise. I had never seen an Amish person getting a tan, at least not by lying motionless. We came across one supine woman reading a book. I stopped the car, and she got up to chat.

“Are you from Pennsylvania?” I asked her. She was. She said that she was going back tomorrow. Most of the Amish here, she told us, come down for a few weeks in the winter. I had thought that they were permanent residents, perhaps even farming here, but later I read that they had been lured down in the 1920s but found the soil unsuitable for the celery they thought they could grow. Yet they had enjoyed the sun, and the warm weather, so they started to come down every winter. And if you think about it, much of Amish life is spent outdoors; Florida gives the people the opportunity to increase the time they spend outside. And if it means riding a cycle instead of driving a buggy (Sarasota doesn’t allow horses on its roads), so be it. The woman told us that the house behind her was an Airbnb she had rented for her stay, and that next week young people would be coming for spring break. It was odd hearing these two modern-day institutions appear in the German-accented speech of a woman in 18^th century dress.

We wished her safe travels home and headed down the street to the dead end. Turning around, we saw a woman in a swimsuit sunbathing in her front yard. She was from Indiana, she told us, and not Amish; she was staying in her sister-in-law's house. I said it seemed like a safe, quiet neighborhood.

“We had a break-in a few months ago,” she said. Of course, the car in front was a sign that the residents weren’t Amish, but why would burglars even go to a neighborhood where the majority of people don’t own jewelry or electronic devices? What would they find to steal – cutlery?

Monday, before leaving Sarasota, we returned to Pinecraft and stopped at Yoder’s Market. A café across the street was full of Amish drinking coffee and eating ice cream. Driving around Lancaster Country, I had always seen the Amish working - plowing fields, baling hay, tilling gardens - and it was new and refreshing to see them relaxing.

We walked through the cafe terrace and found a group of people sitting with suitcases at the back of a building with a sign on the side that said “Tourist Church.”

“There’s a bus coming soon that’s going to take them back to Pennsylvania,” an elderly woman seated on a three-wheeler told us. She wore a black sweater over a long blue dress. The young couple sitting nearby was waiting for the bus, the man in a straw hat and thick brown beard. The hats had changed from Sunday black to weekday straw. His wife told Hania that the Amish don’t travel on planes unless there’s an emergency.

“They’re supposed to get in noon tomorrow,” the woman on the cycle told me, mentioning the town of Intercourse, not sure I would have heard of it, but of course I had. (My uncle lives in Lancaster). “They don’t stop for the night. Then when they arrive there are drivers to take them home. They’re farmers, older men, who drive to make some extra money.”

A big, modern bus pulled into the parking lot. “Ephrata, PA” was written on the side. The driver stepped down and checked a list with a woman in a bonnet. Then the men started loading the luggage into the bow.

We said our goodbyes and headed over to Yoder’s Market, and then the restaurant, where I bought two slices of shoo-fly pie to go. They came in a plastic bag that read: “I (Heart) Yoder’s” and under it: “1 Chronicles 16:34.”

At home I looked up the verse:

“Oh give thanks to the Lord, for he is good;

  for his steadfast love endures forever.”