My kids and I really enjoyed our visit to the Landis Valley Museum. It's off the beaten track, and we missed the entrance, but it's a wonderful place to go. The site has at least 20 buildings on it including a general store, school house, tavern, black smith shop, barn and museum. Most of the buildings are open for touring at your leisure. Touring the grounds you really get a feel for life as a Pennsylvania German hundreds of years ago.

The day we were there we felt like we had the place to ourselves. I'm not sure that it's always so empty...I would hope not, but it was relaxing to let the kids run around and explore. We took 4 girls, two 9-year olds and two 11-year olds. We all enjoyed the film which really helped us understand what we were about to see. The older girls liked taking control of the map and guiding us from place to place. They loved watching the pottery painter and trying their hand at calligraphy. We watched the lace maker in awe! I've never seen that done before. So tedious! The younger two walked around making up stories and pretending they actually lived in this era. We all learned a lot from the helpful volunteers who demonstrated weaving, making lace, drying foods, harvesting seeds, pottery, farming, and black smithing. The volunteers really made our experience because they were excited to tell us what they knew.

The only drawback was that we couldn't find anywhere to eat on the property. We took a short ride to the farm restaurant up the street and returned to finish our tour. There were lots of places to picnic, and next time we will bring our lunch.

We were there in October, just before a big pumpkin festival they have. I would have liked to return for their Christmas Village. The website has lots of information for interesting events being offered throught the year.