Saturday & Sunday, May 1 & 2, 2010-Red Roof Inn, Elkhart IN

They certainly believe in large barns up here in Amish country.

A very pretty farmhouse and barn. There are many of these throughout this area. I don't know how they keep them so neat and clean. The grass is always cut and manicured, the paint is well kept. Gorgeous!

This guy must stay very busy. He does it all with buggies.

I don't know if this is a buggy builder's lot or a sale lot for buggies. Incidentally, it's not near E.J.'s place, pictured above.

You can see several buggies parked between the building and children playing in the yard. The odd thing about this group of kids is that they were not shy when we drove by, waving and not trying to hide their faces when we took photos. Some of them waved for us to stop, but we didn't because of the traffic on the road.

This is The Dime Store in Wakarusa IN, home of the largest jelly beans and "the mother of all jaw breakers" that sold for $8.50 each! Even if I could eat that much candy, I wouldn't have bought one of these things!

A pretty farm. This appeared to be a large corn field. They grow an immense amount of corn in this area.

One of the large "Christmas trees" outside one of the Heartland offices in Elkhart.

I'm not certain what kind of tree this is, but there are a lot of them in the area up here.

More pretty trees in front of the office building.

Saturday morning we slept until after 8:30 but got up and went to eat at a large chain of restaurants that serves a breakfast buffet on the weekend. I apparently got something that didn't agree with me because I was sick the rest of the day. Nothing that I ate tasted bad but it certainly did a number on me. We just stayed around the motel room all day. This room is about twice as big as our trailer's living room, but we certainly feel cooped up in here.

Sunday morning, we slept until almost 9! Of course, I've been staying up until almost 11 at night, mainly because I have started to drink coffee with my meal. It doesn't bother Stella to drink coffee at night but it certainly does for me!

We decided to drive out to a large Farmer's Market between Elkhart and Wakarusa but it was closed today. Too bad for us...

We went to Wakarusa (what a neat name) to see The Dime Store, which claims the largest jelly beans anywhere. I can testify that they have probably the largest selection of candies that I've seen in a long time. They have a lot of the old-fashioned candy that we had as kids. When is the last time you saw Black Jack gum or candy cigarettes? We got a good selection for the boys and then took a scenic drive through the country. We drove through Wakarusa, Napannee, Shipshewana, Bristol and then back to Elkhart. Tell you what, I'll do some research on the names of these times and write about them in the future.

We ate supper at a Chinese buffet restaurant in front of the motel and it was very good. Much better than what we have gotten in Houston the last few times we have been out there. So far, we've been eating out about once a day and since we haven't bought groceries, we're not doing too bad.

So long.