Picnic lunch and the "Road to Charm"

Friday we had a picnic lunch on top of Walnut Creek Hill overlooking Goose Bottom Valley it was beautiful. After lunch we checked into our new room. Room 112 is named "Road to Charm" and it was even nicer than our first room, just two doors down. This is still on the street side and has the big veranda to sit out on and watch the buggy traffic. We looked out and saw that Lester was ready to give buggy rides but he looked bored so we went to cheer him up. Lester is an Amish man and sold his farm about 14 years ago and moved to Walnut Creek to take care of the horses for the Carlisle Inn. We talked with him for a while today after getting our room. His farm is about 3 miles N.W. of Walnut Creek. When he first moved off the farm he had an incident with his buggy horse one day when he was getting ready to hitch her up to the buggy. Amish horses come from horse racing stock, they are either retired racers or were not fast enough to win. Lester says his horse could do a 1:40 mile, a 2 minute mile is 30 miles an hour and when a horse first breaks into a run it is even faster until it tires a bit. Well this horse decided to go back home to the old farm on a busy Friday evening. The horse broke loose, bolted through the stop sign and out into heavy traffic, straight down the middle of hwy 39 headed for home. A motorist saw Lester's dilema and offered him a ride. The horse turned down Township Rd 401 at the Chestnut Ridge Elementary school. That's one and a half miles in traffic on the main highway, with no buggy and no chaperone. By the time Lester's ride arrived at the farm, a neighbor who saw the horse coming down the road caught hold of him until help came.
We learned a new Amish term "Hot at the Stop" is a horse that is raring to go when they are being held at a stop sign.
Lester has also had two buggy accidents with the Walnut Creek limo buggy. Both accidents ended with the buggy laying on its side in the parking lot. These accidents started with something as simple as a rein getting hung up in the wrong place which caused the horse to start circling in ever tighter radius until the whole works toppled on its side. Thankfully no quests were in the buggy at the time, and it didn't necessarily make me want to go for a buggy ride at this time.
We went for a nighttime walk and met the sweetest Amish lady named Naomi Mast. We talked with her for about forty five minutes and her spirit was so sweet we didn't want to let her go. She told us about Walnut Creek before the tourists came to town. She also told us the best route down the hill winding through the Meadows Development and she invited us to come to their farm Saturday to watch her son Jesse working with the Percheron. When we left her that night we felt we had met either a Saint or an Angel.