By Suzan Davis
This article appeared in various online media in the summer of 2000 and is now included in Suzan's book Babes on Blades.

Imagine skating through Intercourse. You can do it alone, with friends or strangers.  So what’s stopping you?

Forgoing a “Pina Colada-by-the-beach vacation,” Richard Barnet decides a calorie burning adventure is for him. He trades a tour bus and pool side chair for a wind-in-your-face perspective of a new destination. Barnet, Professor of Recording Industry at Middle Tennessee State University, signs up to inline skate through the Amish Country commencing in Pennsylvania’s Lancaster County known for many fine things including a town called Intercourse, located next to a village called Bird in the Hand.

Barnet fretted that his fifty year-old body may not make the grade.  On the first day, “Those fears were dispelled. There were people from all age groups and every conceivable body type and physical condition there,” he says. Lucky for Richard.

The tour organizer, Allan Wright of Zephyr Inline Skate Tours, advised the group to remember to enjoy the scenery and to remember to ask permission before snapping a close up picture of the Amish. The three-day tour offered routes to accommodate beginning, immediate and advanced skaters. A support van tagged along and folks got tips on braking and other techniques by International Inline Skate Association certified instructors. One guide was Amish who happily accommodated questions about his culture.

The Amish embrace an austere life style, shun technology and ride in horse-drawn buggies. Skating on smooth roads past immaculately clean houses, Barnet decided to rest. He took in the “distinctive smell of wonderful, freshly tilled farm soil and the scent of freshly mowed hay ever present when one passes large fields.” Suddenly, he “noticed ten pairs of eyes staring from a window. Apparently it’s okay to stare at those ‘English.’” he says. (Non-Amish are referred to as “the English.”) “Gradually, the mother and five barefoot children walked close – but not too close.” A three-year old ventured forward and asked why he is doing “that” (skating) and “his mother pulled him close to her 19^th century dress as if to say, ‘Don’t talk to strangers.’”

“It was not so much like being in a foreign country but a foreign century,” Barnet recalls. “On Sunday as church let out, dozens of black horse-drawn carriages moved slowly onto the roads. After a while, two of us noticed that we were sandwiched between two lines of carriages – twenty carriages in front of us and about thirty behind. The music-like sound of two hundred horse shoes on the blacktop roadway as children strained to see the English with rolling shoes shall forever stay with me.”