Hitch-hiking with the Amish

My brother shane and I have a tradition. We are both still unmarried, but last year we went on a couple of really fun bachelor parties. We figured that since we are still bachelors we may as well have our own "bachelor parties" every year. Basically that means that we go on some kind of random and unplanned camping trip which usually turns into an adventure.

There is an old rail-road track that crosses the road near by my house. I've always been fascinated by it! It feels kind of mysterious and histlrical, and it has a pretty special place in my heart, which is a story for another time. I have always wondered where the tracks go, so this year for our party shane and I threw some camping equipment, plenty of food (yes, the incredible raman noodles) into some backpacks, and started hiking. The plan was to hike as far as possilbe the first day, find a farmers field to sleep in, then see how far we could get the next day.

The appealing thing about train tracks is that they go to places you would never get to see otherwise. They tend to go behind everything you would drive in front of, through peoples back yards, inbetween farmers fields, and behind rows of shabby section 8 homes. It's a cool perspective, seeing what is behind the false fronts that everybody hides behind. You see all of the garbage and graphiti, the dumps and the abandoned shacks. You also get to see the incredible places that people haven't touched yet. Streams that wind through undeveloped woods, forests that have never been cut. The train runs through the unseen places in America, dark secrets, and beautiful discoveries.

Another cool thing about backpacking down the tracks is that it reminds me of the movie Stand By Me, and it's cool to feel like a kid, exploring a world that is fresh and exciting.

So, I was pretty excited about this trip, and it was really fun. We hiked about 12 miles west of where we started, through woods and fields, through a ghetto that I never knew existed in oxford, throught rural Notingham, when suddenly the track ended. So here we were at 4 pm. Sitting on the tracks behind a potato chip factory with nowhere left to go. We decided to try to make a call and get picked up and go camping somewhere else, but we had to hike down the roads to an easy spot to get picked up. We were kind of tired when along came this Amish dude (I hope it's ok to call an Amish gentleman a dude) driving a plow. Shane yells out, "Hello, can we ride with you?" And he shook his head, smiled and kept on driving. Great, we were unsuccessful hoboes and hitch hikers. Even the Amish wouldn't pick us up!

I never thought that I would envy an Amish person driving their little wagons down a busy street, I never knew that Oxford had a ghetto, I never knew that I could make a killer pot of spaghetti on a railroad track. I guess I learned a lot of things.