We've got all the time in the world.....

Well, we were going to get an early start to Elkhart this morning, but things happen. Late yesterday we got a replacement set of parts for the central vac (which wasn't working right) only to discover that the fittings on the hose don't stay in the outlet. We had a tech come out to look at it, and he says something's not right...either there's a part missing on the hose connector or something is missing in the outlet to hold the hose in. And "if that's the way it's designed, they need to fire the engineer who designed this thing!" Yup! By the way, it's a Dirt Devil central vac system. We are going to be delayed....well, we have all the time in the world...we're  not on a schedule, we're not in any hurry...one thing about being retired, you learn patience if you didn't have it before. You learn to sit and relax, you learn to sit and do nothing for a little while (something VERY hard for me to do)...you learn to smell the roses, as they say....and that's a very good thing. I am sitting here typing the blog, looking out at some purple fall asters, listening to the birds talk to each other, and watching them fly around in front of the window. Not the prettiest landscape, as Hardings Grocery Store is peeking thru the trees on the other side of me, but there is a nice grassy area to the side of the General parking lot with some beautiful conifers nearby and we are right there by the trees....After quite some time, we found out that they weren't able to provide us with the correct hoses for the vac system, they are going to "research" and order something else so off we went on our way....

Waitin' on the women

We arrived at the Elkhart County Fairgrounds in mid afternoon, and after we got settled, we drove to Shipshewanna to get some pretzels at JoJo's and visit my favorite quilting fabric store, Lolly's. The town was VERY crowded..there was a fall craft show going on. We did not look at the crafter's wares as they were starting to close down for the day, but we did manage to explore the beautfully crafted Amish style Davis Mercantile in downtown "Ship-See", a nickname for Shipshewanna.

The Davis Mercantile caters to the gentlemen as well as to the ladies, as you can see from their front porch--plenty of rockers for the guys while they wait for their women to shop! There are many many other wonderful stores in town to explore, from antique shops to the flea market, to antique toy stores, to cheese and meat shops, to garden whirligig and what-not stores. You see lots of Amish culture, wares, and many of the Amish and Mennonites work the local restaurants and businesses. It's a common thing to see the horses hooked up to hitchin' posts right next to the cars in town. We really enjoyed Shipshewanna today. It was 84 degrees and beautiful sunny skies. A great way to spend a Saturday......

A beautiful store inside the Mercantile

Making pretzels at JoJo's

PS.Had a terrible time today with the design of the blog...sorry for any glitches in print size or placement of photos. The computer seemed to have a mind of its own today!  I work on a mac and it comes out very different in the published blog than it looks in the draft. I shudder to think what it might look like on a PC! I think I'm going to have to learn HTML to fix this stuff! Thanks for bearing with us!  Jeannie and Eldy