Holy smokes, there’s a lot to see in Pennsylvania. We started in Doylestown with visits to the Mercer Museum and Moravian Pottery and Tile Works. Both were started by the same guy, Henry Mercer (picture Tom Selleck), back in the day. The Museum contains all kinds of tools and gear from early American crafts and trades like hat making, hornsmithing, whaling and shoemaking… each of them was unexpectedly fascinating. At The Pottery and Tile Works they hand-make handsome tiles and mosaics with an emphasis on folky German and Old English themes. Both of the buildings were built entirely of concrete—roofs and windows, too—at a time when concrete was little used yet. Holly is much impressed with the feel of these places and wants our next home to be built out of concrete. Really.

Next, a visit and tour of Alois Bube’s Brewery in Mount Joy was in order. It’s been around since the mid-1800’s and the place has some neat history to it. It has a series of caverns some three stories below it, where German-born Alois brewed his special Bavarian Ale straight through prohibition, thanks to the out-of-sight location. And for non-beer fans, it was also part of the Underground Railroad system, with a tunnel dug from one of its caverns to the basement of a house across the street. Prosit! The caverns have been kept natural and now offer fine dining with occasional Roman and Pirate theme dinners.

York. One of Harley Davidson’s factories is here—the one where they paint and assemble the bikes after receiving the engines from their Milwaukee plant. We didn’t come to see the hogs though, we came to share a late dinner with friends Dave and Karen, aka “Pops and Mimi.” They took us to a funky deli, Isaac's, that serves up delicious, somewhat eclectic dishes, like ham and pineapple sandwiches on pretzel rolls. We lingered there sipping our iced tea and witnessing flocks of geese land in the pond from the patio. We also received an unexpected candlelight tour of their new home as the power had gone out for the night. There seem to be some themes going on in our trip, here. I’m thinking blackouts and colonial candlesticks.

We paid a sobering visit to the Johnstown Flood Museum while, appropriately enough, it rained all day and all night. After learning about this disaster we were left with the same sort of feelings as those we had after 9/11. In this case, after a long rainstorm, a poorly maintained, privately-owned dam gave way. It released the same amount of water in 14 minutes that Niagara Falls does in over a half an hour. When it got to the crowded steel-mining city in May 1889, it was a 37-foot wall of water. The photos and stories are ghastly.

On a lighter note, we also made a trip to Gravity Hill. It’s a hard-to-find little spot where gravity is a bit off kilter and things move uphill instead of down. We experimented with the Tundra… stopping halfway down the hill, putting it in neutral and then letting off the brakes. Immediately, we began rolling backwards, up the hill. We have video to prove it. What a hoot!