Eating More Calories Than We Burned

Our fun times in the midwest are not over. We stretched our Midwest Tandem Rally (MTR) adventure into nine days of cycling! Shipshewana and northeastern Indiana boast the third largest Amish population in the United States. We spent three days riding through LaGrange and Elkhart counties, where we shared the road with horse-drawn buggies and Amish on e-bikes. 

We indulged in some German specialties at the Essenhaus before the first ride.

The creamiest mashed potatoes were hidden beneath the egg noodles 🤷‍♀️!

The next morning, we were all carbed up and ready to go. Let’s ride!

This is many of the thirty couples starting out together.
On the shorter route (32 miles), we saw only one other couple after the route split.
Meet Tom and Marjorie, our riding and bakery companions for the day! Tom says this rig weighs 153 pounds. Yikes!
Amish Bakery stop.

They had beautiful cookies and create your own donuts, but we chose the blueberry-peach fritter on the right! A great selection.

We stayed 3 nights at the Farmstead Inn. It was a short walk to town, and the grounds were beautiful.

Shipshe (as the locals call it) is a tourist town, it’s completely decorated (at Labor Day) for Halloween, or maybe just for the fall season!

Our group smorgasbord dinner spot
A triplet made of cornstalks. We used to ride (a steel) one with our son!

Everyone dined together at the Blue Gate Restaurant. We had our own seating area, close to the smorgasbord.

There are at least 60 of us seated at these four long tables.

It was hard taking pictures of the food bars because they were so long. Think of it as an Amish Golden Corral.

Salad
Main course
Desserts

My dinner plate is on the left, and my dessert plate on the right. I also had a plate of salad, but neglected to photograph it. Best non-dessert dish: the fried chicken. Best dessert: any of the pies.

After dinner we strolled around town and took advantage of additional photo-ops!

Weather threatened the start of the second ride. Ride early and beat the rain or ride when the rain was over? Our choice was to ride early. Our hosts, John and Madelyn, deftly juggled the schedule and arranged for a late afternoon and dinner ride. Most of us stayed fairly dry. We experienced only a few minutes of light rain at our halfway point, but got our ride in and were back at the hotel before the storm blew through.

Overtaking a buggy. They go about 15 MPH at top speed. You can see the damage the horse’s hooves cause to the pavement.
It never turned into a sunny ride. Good thing the yellow glasses were on the trip because they brighten any dark day.

After the ride we lunched with Laura and Earle at Bob’s Pretzels.

These are pretzel pockets (meatball and pork). They were huge, and were finished at breakfast the next morning!
Pumpkin Spiced Latte dessert pretzel shared by the table! Very sweet and very gooey.
And because we hadn’t had enough dessert for one day, we visited a creamery after dinner!

The final ride was a short get-away ride before our departure. It was (as is the norm) a smaller group.

Ride preps for the group at the hotel.
Parts of the ride were on the Pumpkin Vine trail. They made it 14 miles longer since our last visit here over a decade ago!
Check out this fun roller coaster road and another shot of what horses and buggies do to the asphalt!
Clouds, but no rain on this day.
In the corn fields near the end of the ride.

It took us two days to get home. There’s one more trip left in a busy travel year. We will catch up with you from SoCal sometime next month!

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