Rainy Day Outing

It was Tuesday afternoon, and pouring rain.  We should have been packing to return home the next day, but we still wanted some photos.  Danny had shown us some wonderful places on Sunday, but the battery of our camera died shortly after we left the house.  So off we went, hoping in spite of the rain to get a few good pictures.

Our first stop was the Amish store.  We'd been there earlier and seen their huge bins of apples and retuned to get some to make applesauce for dinner.  See, it really was rainy!

We then headed up a dirt road, past our friends' house, and on toward Centerville.

Tom tells me that when he lived on the farm in 9th grade most of the roads were dirt.  On a typical day, three or four cars would pass their home.  Some days, the mailman was the only one to pass!  Not so now.  Most of the roads are paved and the number of cars (and joggers) that pass the house daily has grown considerably.

We were intent on finding the windmills that Danny had taken us to see on Sunday.  The hills of Allegany County provide a great source of wind to be harnessed, and 67 turbines are in operation there.  On Sunday these elegant white giants stood out majestically against the blue sky; on Tuesday, they all but disappeared in the rain.

An Amish neighbor also had a windmill, but it was a traditional design, commonly used for over a century as a means of drawing water from the ground to feed the livestock, irrigate the farms, and supply drinking water.  (It's the kind of windmill that Tom always wanted to convert to an electricity-producing one, like the turbines in the photo above, for home use.)

Time to head home, make that applesauce, pack, and see Jim and Laura before falling into bed.  What a great day it turned out to be, rain and all!