Tag: Pennsylvania Travel

Oktoberfest in My Own Backyard

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It was the accordion music pumped from the stage that sealed the deal. A crowd gathered on the dance floor, raising a hundred glasses in unison as we chanted, “Zicke-Zacke, Zicke-Zacke, Oi, Oi, Oi!” and drank as one.

Beer sloshed over the edges of full mugs as they clanged together. Schnitzel and wurst were piled high on plates next to potato salad, kraut and red cabbage. The crowd was squeezed together underneath the tents, and strangers squished themselves onto the long benches of the impromptu beer halls. For those left with standing room only, they found themselves dancing and swaying with the music, whether it was a polka or a rendition of “Thunderbird.” For a few hours, everyone was friends. It was a barely controlled, perpetual party on the edge of a mountain range.

No, dear reader, I did not book a flight to Germany for Oktoberfest. I did, however, do the next best thing by attending one of the top Oktoberfests this side of the Atlantic, conveniently located only 45 minutes from my house.

The Reading Liederkranz is known for putting on one heck of a party. It is consistently ranked among the top four Oktoberfests in America and has snagged the number one spot twice. What makes it so good isn’t necessarily the sheer size, though it boasts that it is the largest in Pennsylvania, but rather its adherence to authenticity. At least as much as one can get in the United States.

Rather than being put on by a beer corporation or local tourism bureau looking to cash in, it is hosted by a German social club. This means they are dedicated to preserving their German heritage, as they have been since the late 1800s. They are descendants of German settlers, committed to maintaining their culture. The celebrations open with the tapping of the beer by local officials. German bands are brought in to play, and many of the members show up wearing authentic lederhosen and dirndls.

The food is certainly worth celebrating as well. It held up to my memories of Bavarian food from my brief sojourn there during my study abroad. And, of course, there is the beer. It flows from every corner of the festivities, with generous pours.

I went on a Friday evening with my sister. Unlike Oktoberfest in Bavaria, the Reading Oktoberfest is a bit more truncated, with only a few days beginning in September and running into the first weekend of October. We met at one of the free parking lots to take the shuttle up to the Liederkranz, which sits near the summit of Mount Washington, although it’s technically more of a hill. We arrived right around 5:00 pm, when the food vendors were opening and before the crowd could fill up.

The first thing we did was just wander around to take it all in. For me, it was like taking a plane ride back to Germany, with the exception that almost no one spoke German, an oversight if you ask me.

For my sister, it was like stepping into a whole other world. When I just seemed to know exactly what to do when prompted, such as calling out “Oi, Oi, Oi!” or knowing to drink when they said “Prost,” she just looked semi-confused. Half the fun was sharing my love of German culture with her and teaching her things about it that I had forgotten weren’t self-evident to an American unfamiliar with it.

Naturally, we had to sample the food and have a beer before being thoroughly entertained by the band that was playing. I had the schnitzel platter, whereas she had a “Beyond Wurst” and potato pancakes with applesauce, as she doesn’t eat pork. We split an apple strudel with ice cream for dessert. The beer we chose was an apple cider beer, as my sister is also not that fond of beer. I suppose it’s not much of a surprise why she wasn’t overly familiar with German culture prior to this outing. I probably drank most of the beer, but she had some as well.

Of course, this particular Oktoberfest cannot compare to the one in Munich. A small social club simply cannot compete with a city hosting over 7 million people. It was much closer to the “quieter” celebrations of the rest of Bavaria, which is precisely why I enjoyed it.

I am not someone who enjoys huge crowds and, while I love German culture, I’m also not a huge beer drinker. I enjoy a party, but I went to a dry campus on purpose in college. So, to be honest, I wasn’t sure I would actually ever want to go to Oktoberfest in Germany. It would be extremely expensive to go and discover that I actually do not want to spend hours drinking beer, eating food, riding random attractions, singing loudly in a huge crowd and being part of one of the world’s largest parties.

As it turns out, it probably would not be on my Bucket List to do.

I enjoyed my time, but not for more than a few hours. I certainly wouldn’t want to go for a whole week or more. Besides, there are many other places I would want to go in Germany other than a beer tent. If I happened to be travelling around that time and happened to have a day to pop in, I could see going. Although the sheer logistics of trying to get in would probably make it a pass, and I’d instead opt for a smaller celebration nearby.

Which I only really learned by trying out a scaled-down version of it in my own backyard.

And honestly, that might be one of my favourite things about the Bucket List Life. Sometimes you don’t have to travel halfway around the world to discover whether something belongs on your list. You can find a smaller version nearby, try it for yourself and discover that the experience you imagined might not actually be the experience you wanted.

If you’re looking for your own Oktoberfest next year, I’d recommend doing a little digging before simply buying tickets to the biggest event you can find. If authenticity is what you’re after, skip the corporate-sponsored celebrations and look for a local Liederkranz, German social club or German cultural organisation. These smaller celebrations are often rooted in the communities that are actually preserving the traditions, rather than simply recreating the aesthetic of them.

You might not get seven million people, a giant midway or enough beer to fill a swimming pool. What you might get is an accordion band, a plate of schnitzel, someone teaching you when to yell “Oi, Oi, Oi!” and a table full of strangers who are suddenly your friends.

And really, isn’t that what a good Oktoberfest is supposed to be?

The Autumn We Almost Lost

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There are some things that feel so thoroughly associated with autumn that we hardly think of them as special anymore.

Pumpkin patches. Hayrides. Apple picking. The crispness in the air. Rows of trees heavy with fruit. We see these things every year, or at least we expect to.

After an unusually warm growing season followed by a late frost in the spring, much of the apple harvest in our region was lost. Something I had always thought of as an almost ubiquitous autumn activity suddenly became a rather rare treat. There were fewer apples to pick, and suddenly the ones hanging from the trees felt a little more precious.

This year, however, apple picking was a rather different affair.

In fact, there was not a single apple orchard in the whole county offering apple picking. In order to find one, we had to look further afield, across the river to Flinchbaugh’s Orchard and Farm Market, to make the most of what remained. I had checked their Facebook page and discovered that this past weekend was possibly the only weekend they would be offering apple picking. A rare treat indeed.

So, on a Saturday morning, my sister and I set out on a small journey to the farm. It’s a quaint market full of fresh local produce on the inside and a sprawling flower market outside. At this time of year, it was overflowing with pumpkins. Food trucks were parked outside, and the smell of fresh apple cider donuts wafted through the air.

After purchasing our tickets and bag for apples, we climbed aboard a wagon for a tour of the farm, riding past fields of sunflowers, wildflowers, pumpkins and, eventually, the apple orchards. The orderly rows of trees stretched out before us, their branches holding clusters of apples together in little golden bunches.

As we rode towards the orchard, we passed the machinery being used to gather the commercial harvest. Two men working nearby paused to politely tip their hats as we passed. There was something wonderfully old-fashioned about the gesture, even as enormous modern equipment rumbled through the rows. Bees hummed lazily between the trees, gathering their own harvest as we gathered ours.

These were Golden Delicious, but they were unlike the Golden Delicious I usually pick up at the supermarket. These apples were honey-sweet and bursting with flavour. Crisp, fresh and still warm with the lingering memory of the sun, they tasted like the season itself.

Perhaps knowing how easily the harvest could have been lost made them taste even better.

And then there was the cat.

Oh, the cat.

An orange cat had apparently appointed himself official ambassador of the apple orchard. He was wonderfully friendly, purring loudly as he made his rounds among the visitors. Clearly accustomed to attention, he seemed determined to ensure that no one left the orchard without first receiving an appropriate amount of feline hospitality.

Naturally, we obliged.

After gathering our apples, we wandered into the pumpkin patch.

If the apple orchard was orderly, the pumpkin patch was anything but. The neat rows of trees gave way to a glorious mess of pumpkins, flowers and grasses. Round orange pumpkins appeared wherever you looked, tucked among the vegetation as though they had simply sprung from the earth wherever they pleased. Grasshoppers chirped and sprang out of our way as we tromped through the patch in search of the perfect pumpkin.

It felt less like walking through a cultivated field and more like wandering into autumn itself.

Perhaps that is what I enjoyed most about the day. None of it was particularly extraordinary. We picked apples. We hunted for pumpkins. We rode on a wagon. We took pictures among the wildflowers. We breathed in the crisp autumn air.

And yet this year, the ordinary didn’t feel quite so ordinary.

The apples reminded me that abundance is not guaranteed. A warm winter, a badly timed frost, too much rain or too little can change what a farm is able to produce. Something that seems inevitable when you see it stacked by the dozens in a supermarket can become surprisingly precious when you watch an entire harvest disappear.

Maybe that is one of the pleasures of paying attention. We think we know what a season will bring because we have experienced it before. But every year is slightly different. Some things flourish. Some disappear. Some return unexpectedly. And sometimes the thing you assumed would always be there becomes the thing you are most grateful to have.

This year, I got to pick my own apples.

They were delicious.

There was a pumpkin patch full of flowers and grasshoppers, a wagon ride through the farm, wildflowers waiting to be photographed, bees humming through the orchard and a very affectionate orange cat making his rounds.

It was an ordinary autumn afternoon.

But this year, it was extraordinary.

The Troll Market: A Bazaar of Forgotten Treasures

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It’s spoken of in whispers, its location known only to those who have been. Tucked away down an alley and deeper further in lies a strange bazaar of collected treasures forged from the four corners of the forgotten world. Dragon eyes and swords, magic potions and scrolls, artefacts and antiques stacked to the ceiling. The seemingly endless maze of shelves goes on almost impossibly deep until one is left questioning the physics of the shop. Surely it must end eventually. Every shelf overflows with objects ranging in price from a few cents to a deal you wish you’d never struck. Beware, all sales are final.

Now, could I order a handcrafted scroll off Etsy? Absolutely. But there is just something so much more fun about visiting the Troll Market. I lied about not knowing the location unless you’ve already been. It is easily found via GPS and a quick Google search, but it is better to have someone who has already been show you exactly where it’s semi-hidden in the city. So it was that I had my work partner show me exactly where it was on an unexpected autumn afternoon. We had some time in our schedule to lurk about in the market, and so we made our way there. After parking on the main street, she led me down an alley and up a few stairs to a long hallway, where hanging over the door at the end was a sign proclaiming loudly, “The Troll Market.”

If you’re someone who grew up reading fantasy novels and dreaming of visiting such places as The Floating Market from Neverwhere or the Bizarre Bazaar from A Darker Shade of Magic, then Lancaster’s Troll Market feels straight out of a book, complete with atmospheric music to make your shopping experience an epic adventure. The range of objects, from the practical (car diffusers and organic toothbrushes) to the exotic (owl pellets and fossils), from the beautiful (earrings and tiaras) to the whimsical (ceramic monks), truly blew my mind. It seemed that there was something for any potential whim. My favourite find was a pair of origami dragon earrings.

It was a gamer’s mecca, housing a whole room from floor to ceiling of games, including Magic: The Gathering, tucked next to an in-house tavern available for rent that looked straight out of an epic fantasy novel. Far in the back, there was almost every tabletop figure one could imagine. In another hidden spot was a room dedicated to D&D and other tabletop role-playing games. The table was naturally filled with dirt and (what I assume is fake) bones to set the right atmosphere for a campaign’s climax. Some days, one can hear live music playing from a stage in a corner. Everywhere I looked was another surprise.

Despite the plethora of items, the shop was surprisingly well organised by subject matter. The scrolls sat next to the journals, and the car diffusers were over by the soaps and perfumes. The wooden swords were comfortably nestled next to the clothing. Once one got the lay of the land, so to speak, it was easy to have a general idea of where something might be. Of course, if you were completely lost by the sheer magnitude of items, the very helpful shopkeep was there to lend a hand.

There is something wonderfully different about shopping in a place where you have no idea what you might find. Most shopping trips begin with a destination. You need a new shirt, a birthday gift, perhaps something to put on the wall. You enter the shop, find the thing, pay for it and leave. The Troll Market is not really that sort of shopping experience. It is an expedition.

You wander.

You turn a corner and discover something you had no idea you needed. You peer into a case and find something that makes you wonder who collected it, where it came from, or why anyone thought it would be a good idea to sell it. You follow one shelf only to discover that it leads to another room, which leads to another hallway, which leads to yet another collection of treasures. It is less like shopping and more like exploring a particularly eccentric museum where everything happens to be for sale.

And perhaps that is why I enjoyed it so much. There was no particular item I had gone there to find. I wasn’t shopping for a dragon, a fossil, an antique or a pair of earrings. I simply went to see what was there. In a world where so much of our shopping is done by typing exactly what we want into a search bar, there is something delightful about allowing yourself to be surprised.

This is one of the reasons I think places like the Troll Market belong on a bucket list. Not because everyone needs to own an origami dragon, a ceramic monk or a wooden sword, but because sometimes the adventure is simply going somewhere that makes you curious. You may leave with a treasure. You may leave with nothing but a story. Either way, you have spent an afternoon discovering something you didn’t know existed. 

And sometimes that is enough.

After all, not every adventure needs to be grand. You don’t need a plane ticket, an exotic destination or a carefully planned itinerary. Sometimes all you need is an autumn afternoon, a friend who knows where the mysterious door is, and a willingness to see what is hiding on the other side. 

So, dear reader, where might you find your own strange little bazaar? Start by looking beyond the usual shopping districts. Wander the older parts of your town, explore side streets and alleys, and keep an eye out for the unassuming doors you might normally walk right past. Search for independent shops, antique markets, oddities stores, comic and game shops, or simply ask the person who always seems to know where the interesting places are. Sometimes the best adventures are hiding in plain sight, waiting for someone curious enough to open the door.

The Arcade Lost Between Decades

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There are some places that aren’t readily accessible by taking a train or plane. Because it isn’t a place that one can easily get to through travel, at least not through any normal means. Places that require a little sideways step and a wink at quantum physics, because the place one is trying to get to is lost in time. I speak, of course, of managing through some quirk of the universe to go back to a time before, to re-experience what has now been forgotten or perhaps experience for the first time things we never had the chance to do.

One must slip in between in order to step back and Decades is exactly one of those sorts of places where time doesn’t quite behave the way it should. Tucked in the far northern corner of Lancaster this 95 year old gymnasium has been transformed into a full-service restaurant, bar, six-lane bowling alley, and retro arcade. From the moment you step foot inside you know you’ve left the 2020s behind for some strange pocket of the universe where the late decades of the 20th century have collided together.

High above the vaulted ceiling, bright lights spell out the name “Decades.” Friendly faces greet you at the front desk like agents of time itself directing you through the confusing maze of games and tables. After all, with all these time warps one must be careful not to get too sucked in. To the right, a bowling alley straight out of the 1980s harkens back to the days of your father’s and grandfather’s bowling league. Perhaps you may glimpse a phantom in the timestream sending a ball down for a strike.

To the left is the arcade and restaurant. The old wooden floors creak softly beneath your feet with the sort of comforting wear that only decades of use can produce. The lighting shifts strangely as you walk, never quite settling into a single mood. One moment you stand beneath the icy blue glow of a racing game, the next beneath the feverish reds and yellows of a fighting cabinet. Neon flashes ripple across the floorboards and tables so that the whole arcade feels alive, constantly changing depending on which machines are calling out nearby. Along the far left wall stretches a long polished bar lined with gleaming glasses and rows upon rows of illuminated bottles, half hidden behind the dense forest of arcade cabinets like some secret oasis for weary travelers lost in time. Beside nearly every machine sits a small table thoughtfully placed for drinks and baskets of fries, allowing patrons to linger between rounds as though there is nowhere else in the world they need to be.

Games from the late 1970s sit proudly beside their more modern cousins from the early 2000s. The evolution of technology can be a bit jarring when one is able to compare them side by side.

I felt this contrast the most with the two Terminator games that I played. The first one was fully immersive, a gun with real-time feedback requiring a frantic reload through a cartridge at the bottom of the weapon. The second was a janky stationary gun mounted behind glass and pointed at what looked like an aging television screen. Oddly enough, both had their charm. The newer one was undeniably smoother and more exciting, but there was something endearing about the older machine’s clunky stubbornness. Still, I spent a good hour gleefully blasting killer androids into scrap metal.

But I digress, the arcade was not my first impression. My first impression was the restaurant. In the back is a set of booths which provide a bit of respite from the constant chorus of arcade jingles, pinball clatters, and bowling pins crashing in the distance. The menu consists mostly of standard American fare: burgers, sandwiches, wings, and fries. They certainly have salads and your typical appetizers as well, pretzel bits, tacos, pierogies, and onion rings. Now most of these have a different twist than one might expect. For example, the Irish Breakfast Burger consists of a beef patty, portobello mushroom, bacon, sausage, smoked gouda, fried egg, tomato jam, and mayo. Meanwhile the Fire & Ash Burger is stacked with smoked blue cheese, scorched earth sauce, charred leeks, and lemon aioli.

Be warned dear reader, this particular burger is not for the faint of heart. It is quite spicy and left my lips tingling for hours. It was delicious and I highly recommend it for the thrill seekers among you. As one can see, the chefs here are as peculiar as the setting itself. For those concerned by the oddities I’ve just described, worry not. The chef has not taken complete leave of their senses and has mercifully left several menu items unchanged from expectation.

The drink menu is equally surprising in the twists it offers the usual fare. Of course there are sodas and beers, but there is also a delightful collection of specialty cocktails and mocktails for those who do not wish to imbibe. Watching the bartenders work beneath the dim amber glow of the shelves behind them almost feels theatrical, as if one has wandered into some hidden establishment where arcade champions and bowlers have gathered for decades.

After dinner, it really is recommended that you purchase a cup of tokens to enjoy the full bounty of games available across the spectrum of time. There are plenty of games for a whole group to enjoy or for the lone wolves among you.

I had met a few friends there from the sci-fi podcast that I run. Scott was visiting from Europe and we jumped at the chance to spend quality time with him. We updated each other on our lives and made plans for the upcoming summer, the local sci-fi convention, and movies that will be coming out shortly.

Naturally, we engaged in the games, some cooperative and others competitive. I already spoke on my fondness for the Terminator game. Dave was particularly good at it as he placed fifth on the machine. I did manage to beat him in kill count during one of the rounds, so naturally I was quite proud of myself. Scott managed first place in a racing game while Miles took his turn conquering Space Invaders.

True to its nature, Decades managed to warp the passage of time as well, for it seemed that I had only blinked and hours had passed in the outside world. Perhaps that is the true magic of places such as these. Not merely nostalgia, nor novelty, but the rare ability to make adults forget the clock entirely.

How might you find such a place?

And should you wish to find an antique arcade of your very own, I encourage you to seek out the strange little corners of old cities and forgotten downtowns. Often these places hide inside repurposed factories, aging theaters, old gymnasiums, or warehouses whose glory days seem long behind them. Look for neon signs glowing faintly against brick walls, listen for the distant chorus of pinball bells and synthesized music, and do not be afraid to wander through an unassuming doorway. Every now and then, if the universe is feeling particularly generous, you may just stumble into a pocket of lost time yourself.

Cost: $50 (that covered two drinks, my Fire & Ash Burger and my arcade experience)

Completed: 2026

Miles from home: 18 miles

Want to discover more adventures? Check out my whole Bucket List and Reverse Bucket List