TRAVEL - PENNSYLVANIA - AMERICA OLD & NEW

We don't live in America, US citizens like to tell you, America lives in us.If that's true, then Americans must be extremely complex people. Take Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, a couple of hours to the North of Washington and home to the Amish, a people who have chosen to ignore the march of time. For more than 200 years, they have dressed, lived and farmed the same way, ignoring every pressure to conform to modernity.

Fly into Baltimore, Washington or Philadelphia as we did, get yourself a rental car and explore. We decided to try a Lincoln LS, a car Ford nearly sold in the UK, developed as it was alongside Jaguar's S-TYPE. Ours was the 4.0-litre V8 version which provided glorious performance, excellent refinement and an average of around 17mpg throughout our trip: but then who cares about that in a land where petrol is a pound a gallon?

Not that the Amish, who rely exclusively on horse-drawn transport, care much about fuel prices. Theirs is a curious mixture of beliefs. They can (if absolutely necessary) travel in motorised transport, though since no Amish person is allowed to drive, they rarely do. They can have modern items like welders and powersaws for the adults and rollerblades for the kids but they aren't allowed tractors or combines to harvest their crops. They can grow tobacco for the cigarette makers but they refuse to go to war in case they might hurt someone. Then there's the problem of inter-marriage up to the level of second cousins within families, which has produced some unpleasant, if predictable, side-effects in their huge families. Plus there's the fact that children aren't allowed to complete more than half their education before being seconded back to work on the family farms.



Yet for all that, it's hard not to like the Amish. They're kindly, God-fearing Christian people who travel far and wide, often right across America, voluntarily helping out when disaster strikes. Their little black horse-drawn carriages are everywhere across Lancaster County and their pretty white fa...