Friends and relatives greet the new arrivals with hugs and shrieks of delight. As in the most discriminating resorts, everyone dresses alike: The women wear prayer caps; the men, barn-door britches held up by suspenders. There are no bikinis or Bermuda shorts; no boom boxes or beer bottles.<\/p>\n
In a long, lazy line, they trickle down the sun-splattered streets, lugging pillows and suitcases, their farmhouse fashions a kooky counterpoint to this modern oasis of whitewashed homes and wind-blown palm trees. <\/p>\n
Welcome to Pinecraft, a little-known getaway for the horse-and-buggy set that defies their somber stereotype. <\/p><\/blockquote>\n
In fact, so many Amish travel south for the winter, Dave Swartzentruber decided to start a bus line.<\/p>\n
“We used to rent out 15-passenger vans,” Swartzentruber says. “The Amish would rent the van and then hire a non-Amish person to drive it. I got to thinking, My goodness, there’s a lot of people going to Florida. I could buy a bus and haul them back and forth.'” <\/p>\n
Every Wednesday afternoon, a 50-passenger Pioneer Trails motor coach pulls out of the parking lot of Mary Yoder’s Amish Kitchen in Middlefield. The bus picks up more low-tech tourists in the parking lots of restaurants, post offices and grocery stores in Hartville, Sugarcreek, Berlin, Mount Hope, Wooster, Columbus and Cincinnati. Then it rolls onto Interstate 75 for the 17-hour ride to Pinecraft. There is a one-hour stop for breakfast at the Cracker Barrel restaurant in Tifton, Georgia. A second Pioneer Trails bus makes a weekly Wednesday run through Indiana, picking up Amish snowbirds in towns such as Nappanee, Middlebury and Shipshewana<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I’d read an article about this before, but here’s a new one, especially for those under the impression that the Amish don’t travel unless by horse and buggy: (It’s a really nice article – well worth your time) A Piece of Paradise: Friends and relatives greet the new arrivals with hugs and shrieks of delight.…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":180,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7690","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"yoast_head":"\n
Amish Spring Break - Via Media<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2004\/03\/amish_spring_break.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Amish Spring Break - Via Media\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"I’d read an article about this before, but here’s a new one, especially for those under the impression that the Amish don’t travel unless by horse and buggy: (It’s a really nice article – well worth your time) A Piece of Paradise: Friends and relatives greet the new arrivals with hugs and shrieks of delight.…\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:url\" content=\"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2004\/03\/amish_spring_break.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:site_name\" content=\"Via Media\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:published_time\" content=\"2004-03-17T11:52:13+00:00\" \/>\n<meta name=\"author\" content=\"awelborn\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:card\" content=\"summary_large_image\" \/>\n<!-- \/ Yoast SEO plugin. -->","yoast_head_json":{"title":"Amish Spring Break - Via Media","robots":{"index":"index","follow":"follow","max-snippet":"max-snippet:-1","max-image-preview":"max-image-preview:large","max-video-preview":"max-video-preview:-1"},"canonical":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2004\/03\/amish_spring_break.html","og_locale":"en_US","og_type":"article","og_title":"Amish Spring Break - Via Media","og_description":"I’d read an article about this before, but here’s a new one, especially for those under the impression that the Amish don’t travel unless by horse and buggy: (It’s a really nice article – well worth your time) A Piece of Paradise: Friends and relatives greet the new arrivals with hugs and shrieks of delight.…","og_url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2004\/03\/amish_spring_break.html","og_site_name":"Via Media","article_published_time":"2004-03-17T11:52:13+00:00","author":"awelborn","twitter_card":"summary_large_image","schema":{"@context":"https:\/\/schema.org","@graph":[{"@type":"WebPage","@id":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2004\/03\/amish_spring_break.html","url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2004\/03\/amish_spring_break.html","name":"Amish Spring Break - Via Media","isPartOf":{"@id":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/#website"},"datePublished":"2004-03-17T11:52:13+00:00","dateModified":"2004-03-17T11:52:13+00:00","author":{"@id":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/#\/schema\/person\/aea2dcda1635c9c2d6030d9c7595725a"},"breadcrumb":{"@id":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2004\/03\/amish_spring_break.html#breadcrumb"},"inLanguage":"en-US","potentialAction":[{"@type":"ReadAction","target":["https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2004\/03\/amish_spring_break.html"]}]},{"@type":"BreadcrumbList","@id":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2004\/03\/amish_spring_break.html#breadcrumb","itemListElement":[{"@type":"ListItem","position":1,"name":"Home","item":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia"},{"@type":"ListItem","position":2,"name":"Amish Spring Break"}]},{"@type":"WebSite","@id":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/#website","url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/","name":"Via Media","description":"Amy Welborn","potentialAction":[{"@type":"SearchAction","target":{"@type":"EntryPoint","urlTemplate":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/?s={search_term_string}"},"query-input":{"@type":"PropertyValueSpecification","valueRequired":true,"valueName":"search_term_string"}}],"inLanguage":"en-US"},{"@type":"Person","@id":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/#\/schema\/person\/aea2dcda1635c9c2d6030d9c7595725a","name":"awelborn","image":{"@type":"ImageObject","inLanguage":"en-US","@id":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/#\/schema\/person\/image\/","url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-content\/wphb-cache\/gravatar\/9f2\/9f2100183464289fedc5b8a621c15110x96.jpg","contentUrl":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-content\/wphb-cache\/gravatar\/9f2\/9f2100183464289fedc5b8a621c15110x96.jpg","caption":"awelborn"},"description":"Amy Welborn was born in 1960, the only child of a now-retired professor of political science, a teacher-librarian-artist mother,deceased since 2001, was a teacher, librarian and artist. The Catholicism comes from her side. Amy grew up in a number of places - Indiana - Washington, DC - Lubbock Texas - Arlington, Virginia - DeKalb, Illinois - Lawrence, Kansas - and Knoxville, Tennessee, where the family settled in 1973. She attended Knoxville Catholic High School, then the University of Tennessee where she majored in history. She received an MA in Church History from Vanderbilt University, where she wrote a thesis on the changing role of women in 19th century American Protestantism, and the ways Scripture was used to justify those changes. She worked as as a teacher in Catholic high schools and a Parish Director of Religious Education and started writing for the diocesan press - the Florida Catholic - in 1988. Amy has written columns for Our Sunday Visitor and Catholic News Service at times over the past twenty years. Her articles have been published in venues ranging from Our Sunday Visitor to the New York Times to Commonweal. She has written 17 books. 18, if you included the as yet tragically unpublished novel. Amy has five children, ranging in age from 26 to 4 and was married to Michael Dubruiel, who died unexpectedly in February 2009. She lives in Birmingham, Alabama.","url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/author\/awelborn"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7690","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/180"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7690"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7690\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7690"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7690"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7690"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}