Scene on the Road

Looking at "freeway fast" travel, I'm OFF the two lanes and ON the Pennsylvania Turnpike for Week 6, making a tour of rest stops east of Harrisburg - both east and westbound.

I sometimes feel snobbish for stressing the journey - usually on back roads - over the destination, but I'm the first to admit If covering great distances in the least amount of time is your goal, you can't beat the interstate highway system. But they ARE boring. Well, at least not as visually interesting as the slower routes.

So as long as I'm on the freeway going fast, I decide to slow down as I visit a few of Pennsylvania's "multi-concept service plazas" (rest stops to you and me). As East Coast drivers, with all of our toll roads, we take our rest stops for granted. In most of the rest of the country easy-on, easy-off means vending machines. Ours have video games, clean and spacious restrooms, pay-phones, travelers maps, CNN on television, as well a smörgåsbord of eats. Some even have outdoor Farmers Markets.
The westbound Peter J. Camiel rest stop at mile post 304.8 - "46 miles to next Service Area" - offers Cinnabon, Brioche Doree, Roy Rogers, Sbarros, Starbucks, Hershey's Ice Cream, a gift Shop, plus an APlus convenience store at the Sunoco gas station.

Among the morning commuters stopping for coffee, that's where I meet Alice Gray sitting in the passenger seat of her King Ranch F-350 Ford pickup, attached to a 28 foot trailer. They stopped to walk Sparkie, and so husband Jim could take a little nap at the start of a three week cross country road trip. They planned to leave at 4am, but got a late start from home in Browns Mills, NJ. They're going to South Dakota's Black Hills, Yellowstone and Colorado before coming back via Branson and Nashville (besides the Great Outdoors, they like music).

As I run back to my car to retrieve my pen, Alice wakes Jim up. The couple "started with a tent in the mid-80's," he says. "Then we got a pop-up camper, a travel trailer, and now this. It's called a fifth wheel." Jim figures the next step, which he's in no hurry to take, would be an RV. With the trailer, they can leave it in the campground, and still take day trips with the pickup.

I'm on a different kind of road trip this week, driving really fast and pulling over not when and wherever I see something I want to photograph, but ONLY at official government-sanctioned sites. I'm visiting rest stops - both west and eastbound - on the Pennsylvania Turnpike.

At the westbound Peter J. Camiel Service Plaza - milepost 304.8 - I get out of my car, and in the space next to me I see real cash money and valuables right out in the open on the front passenger seat. The sight jars me, like I've entered a parallel universe. Not that crime doesn't happen in the country, where I've heard people don't lock their houses and leave their cars running outside the Post Office. But I can't remember ever seeing a pile of broken automobile glass along the sidewalk or curb in rural America.

Checking my voice mail messages, I'm standing at a pay phone in the foyer of the eastbound Bowmansville Service Plaza - milepost 289.9 - when I hear a body slam hard into the glass door. My camera's right there, so I point and shoot. It's seventeen year old Katie Grantz racing her younger brother Jeff from their car.

"They've been stuck with me for hours," their mother Beth says. The three are on their way from New Castle, near Lake Erie, to a Christian retreat - camping on the beach - in Wildwood, NJ. A home-schooled junior, Katie is also visiting colleges along the way. Mom wants her someplace close. "I'm gonna follow you the rest of your life," she tells Katie, who gets in the last word: "I have different plans." All three are looking at the Starbucks menu board, before opting for a soft pretzel at another kiosk. That's also them pointing at the "You are Here" map - a "Travel Board InfoCenter" - at the top of this post.

I'm still at Bowmansville when two cars full of women get out to stretch their legs. They're re-arranging - and re-distributing - some of the refreshments in the back of Tina "Rosemary" Miller's SUV when I wander over. The scene just shouts "Road Trip" in capital letters. They even have a theme! That's Victoria Samson in the hat. They've been on the road about an hour, headed toward Cape May.

The group began when Sally Rhine, center, and Denise Shrander, second from left, started carpooling to work north of Harrisburg twenty years ago. They were joined by other co-workers and high school friends and relatives, and eventually started taking annual "girls only" vacations to the shore. Two more will be joining them tomorrow, and three are no-shows this year. Oh, the theme for this year's trip? Purses. Previous themes, still in evidence: sunglasses, tiaras, cup cozies, shoes and sunglasses.

In most of the rest of the county, commercial businesses like gas stations and restaurants are not permitted at rest areas. Our full-service rest stops were grandfathered in when Eisenhower created the Interstate highway system. The government's idea was to protect businesses in small towns that provided those services along the highway.

Sunrise (near Mid-County - Exit 20) and moon rise (at Valley Forge Plaza - Eastbound at milepost 324.5).

I'm on U.S. Highway 322, passing though upper Lancaster County as I drive from West Chester to Hershey. Since I spent a week exploring "Pennsylvania Dutch" country for the newspaper last summer, I am avoiding most of the Amish-themed tourist sites on this Week 7 Road Trip.



But the religious heritage of the area is impossible to ignore. Thanks to William Penn's tolerance, many sects having trouble with authorities in their own homeland found their way to Pennsylvania. I end up in one of the oldest of those communities - the Ephrata Cloister.

After being banished from Germany. Pietist Johann Conrad Beissel also ended up here, where - after first settling in Germantown - he founded the Cloister in 1732. At it's peak, some 300 celibate Brothers and Sisters and married local farm families awaited the second coming, living simply at the Cloister, instead of seeking earthly rewards. That's Beissel's home on the right. Above is Saron, the Sisters House, constructed in 1743.

But a monastic life didn't mesh well with the pioneer spirit of our new nation, and even Beissel's successor could see the writing on the wall, telling Benjamin Franklin: “The mind of Americans is bent another way.” By 1813 the last of the celibate members had died.

The smell of ancient wood is all around and the temperature feels like it's dropped ten degrees as I step into the old-tree shade and walk among the surviving original structures, now restored and administered by the Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission. The sound of a worker's power saw is the only intrusion I encounter as I make still life photographs of the old European-styled buildings.

Just as in areas of wonderful natural beauty, I am torn between waiting for another visitor to walk through the scene - giving it some scale and human interest - or just making photographs of the details. As is often the case, patience loses out as I attempt to capture visually what I feel and experience at the site.

Less than a mile up Ephrata's Main Street I encounter another religious community in a traditional religious setting - the church fundraising car wash. Colorful sign and balloon-holding teenagers are waving down passing cars, inviting them to the Bethany Slavic Church parking lot.

Fourteen year-old Valentina Zaytsev (she's on the right, in the photo below) and Lily Danilyuk, 15, (next to her) along with members of the church's youth group are collecting money for orphans in Russia. Zaytsev's family, who immigrated in 1991, will travel back to their hometown of Lipetsk outside Moscow later this summer on a church mission.

They just got their own church three years ago. The Pentecostal congregation was founded by pastor Mikhail Khoklan in in 1989, and over the years had been renting space at a big Mennonite church in East Earl Township. "It was, like, surrounded by cornfields," Zaytsev tells me. "All the other Russian churches called us the Corn Church," Danilyuk adds.

The division of labor: the teenage girls out front on Main Street, the twenty-something men of the congregation doing the wet rag heavy lifting in the parking lot behind the church, and the teenage boys counting the money on the steps.




Lancaster County is home to about a half dozen other Russian churches, most started by families of émigrés who arrived during the time of glasnost, when the Soviet government allowed evangelical Christians, many fleeing religious persecution, to leave for the U.S.