So last Saturday was my birthday.  It was lovely to have it fall on a Saturday so that I had the day off!  Too many times in recent years the company president schedules a trip to PA during the week, which makes it extra busy.  He *was* up the week before, but all the extra busy-ness was over by the time my birthday arrived.

I took last Friday off (as I have been doing for much of the summer) and went to an AirBnB within about an hour's drive--just far enough to really feel "away" but not so far that the drive was stressful.  (I pretty much stopped driving distances during the pandemic.  Since I work a mile from where I live, most of my driving is within a 3-mile radius of home, and maybe once a month, I'll drive to a nearby town and go about 10 miles away.  Driving 50 miles or more has thus become a stressor that I tackle about once a year.)

Where I stayed was on a historic Amish homestead, the Nicholas Stoltzfus family home.  It turns out that everyone in the US with the last name of Stoltzfus is descended from the former owner of this property.

The original homestead is still there and I was given a private tour by the caretaker.  (The property is owned by a non-profit group, and a couple with the last name of Stoltzfus are the current caretakers.  The AIrBnB fees are used to support the upkeep of the property.)  Where you stay is in the reconstructed barn.  The caretakers live on the first floor of the barn, and the unit they rent is about 1/3 of the second floor of the barn.  The other 2/3s of the second floor is rented out for meeting space.  The property is built on a hill, so even though it's on the second floor, there are no stairs to climb.

Where the property is located is actually very close to the highway, but you have to drive down a long roadway, past a local Penn State campus and the campus of a retirement home, before you get to the property.  Then the deadend of the road due to the highway (built about 30 years ago) is just past the end of the property.  The caretaker showed me a map--when they were building the highway, there were eight different alternate routes they considered using, several of which would have gone right through the property--that's when and why the nonprofit was formed.  And the owner of the retirement community next door (the son of a former state governor) was helpful with the funding needed to save the property from being destroyed.  The current caretakers will be pursuing getting the property put on the national historic register soon--it's not there yet.

Right across the road is a creek, and a four-mile long towpath that runs along it.  There's a Park Ranger house a quarter-mile away, so the towpath feels very safe.  (That's especially nice because, since the pandemic, my current city has allowed a homeless encampment to occupy a large space alongside the towpath near my house, so I no longer feel safe running and walking there by myself, something I have done for nearly 30 years.)

Since check-in was at 3 on Friday, I got there shortly after and, after checking in, went to the nearby Pennsylvania Dutch Farmers Market to pick up dinner. We have a Farmer's Market locally that is similar (and similar to Reading Terminal Market, if you have visited that in Philly).  This Farmer's Market was smaller and exclusively run by Amish and Mennonite stallholders, unlike the larger Farmer's Markets.  I picked up a pint of chicken salad, two pre-made vegetable salads, a gluten-free peach pie and Whoopie pie, and a few peaches for my stay.

The drive had fatigued me (the stress of driving), so I went to bed early.  On my birthday itself, I had my tour of the historic home and then visited the Ephrata Cloister in the afternoon.  I had heard of the Ephrata Cloister previously but had not visited.  This is the remnants (about 10%) of the original community from the 1700s which was started by Conrad Beissel, an Anabaptist minister who founded his own sect, distinct from the other Anabaptist groups by virtue of two beliefs:  1.  The Sabbath should be celebrated on Saturday; and 2. The return of Christ was imminent, so that believers should shun wordly marriage and dedicate themselves soley to Christ--in other words, be celebate.  Not a recipe for a long-standing religion!  In actual fact, the community consisted of Brothers, Sisters, and Householders.  The Brothers and Sisters adhered to all the beliefs, while the Householders were married couples who believed in some but not all of the beliefs of the community and helped with economic support.  The Brothers and Sisters slept for only 6 hours a night--from 9 to midnight, and then from 2 am to 5 am.  From midnight to 2 am, they had a night watch service, since it was Beisel's belief that Christ would return during that time.

The community was also unique in fostering several women composers.  The Ephrata Chorus still continues today.  They also produced a unique style of calligraphy called fraktur used for making posters of religious phrases or important personal papers.

I did go out to dinner for my birthday, finding a Japanese restaurant nearby and treating myself to a rice bowl.

On Sunday, I went for a 3.6 mile walk/jog along the towpath, and stayed on the property until 1 pm (an extra two hours allowed me by the caretakers) before driving home.

Staying here was about $75 cheaper for a two-night stay than the Bed and Breakfast in the Poconos where I usually stay (although, unlike the B&B, there was no breakfast included).  While I had to provide my own food, the fact that the property was only about a mile from the Farmers Market pretty much compensated for that.  The area is busier and noisier than the Poconos since it is in the middle of a city, but, while I won't give up on my other B&B (which sits right along the Delaware River), I'll also add this place into my regular rotation of spots to visit for a weekend get-away.