Shopping in Amish Country

If you live in a motor home, you don't spend much time shopping because you don't have room for anything new. But we have a couple things on our shopping list, and this northern Indiana area seems to be the place to take care of that. The first thing we need to do is shop for an upholsterer. About a year ago, we began noticing that the leather on our captain's chairs was cracking.

Mark contacted Flexsteel, the company that made the chairs. Sure enough, they had other people reporting problems with those seats. Even though our motor home is out of the normal warranty, they agreed to provide new leather chair covers. They would not, however, pay to have them installed. Being in RV country, Mark found a company that makes RV seats, and they worked us into their schedule. Mission accomplished, and $200 later, we now have like-new captain chairs.

We also thought that this would be a great place to shop for a new recliner for our motor home. We just don't use the little one that barely fits at the end of our sleeper sofa. So we were hoping to find something more comfortable. With our limitation in width and depth, we never did find one that actually fit Mark's six-foot frame and Denisa's somewhat shorter frame. But while we were shopping, we did find this mammoth recliner. It's too big for both of us, and would never fit in our motor home. No, we didn't buy it.

We also purchased a new bathroom rug. That's not very interesting, but can you believe we went to 6 different stores before we finally got the perfect one purchased? It's a good thing we don't have to shop much, because we obviously aren't very good at it!

While we were in Shipshewana, we also did some shopping at a place called Davis Mercantile. The main reason for our stop here was to see the carousel on the third floor. Denisa is a merry-go-round fan, and she has ridden carousels all over this country. This carousel was the favorite project of Mrs. Davis when the mercantile was built.

Mr. Davis's favorite project was incorporating this 370-year-old Douglas fir into the mercantile's structure. This log is 44 inches in diameter, and runs the height of the entire stair case at the center of the mercantile.

Our trip to Amish Country had to include stops at several Amish grocery stores. We should have taken a picture of all the things we bought, but it's too much to fit into one photo. Food is our favorite souvenir to buy, and we love shopping like the locals. We've stocked up on dill pickles, cheese, meat, candy, noodles, chow-chow, cookies, curds, maple syrup, home-made bread and cinnamon rolls. We did take a picture of the giant bag of kettle corn that we bought from the little Amish girl in the store parking lot. That's a lot of corn!

Mark has always loved a good bakery, and a good Amish bakery is even better. We visited the Rise and Roll Bakery in Nappanee, Indiana, and picked out a day-old little pie and a package of day-old cookies. After we paid with the credit card, Denisa began running those numbers through her head and realized they hadn't taken the day-old discount off the cookies. When she pointed that out, they couldn't figure out how to take that charge off the card. They decided it would be simpler if we just picked out something else for free. Then they insisted we take a full-size pie. So we didn't intend to leave with this many baked goods, but this was our morning's haul out of Rise and Roll Bakery--cowboy cookies, cherry pie, and a free sour cream blueberry pie.

With this kind of shopping, we need to get out of Amish country before we no longer can fit into our newly covered captains chairs!