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You heard me right. A trip to the good ole cheese factory.

Now you see here, I live in a city alright. Ferns and dirt roads, whitetail deer, and pheasants dot the landscape. Sure, we have skyscrapers, and they are hundreds of years old. Traffic? Galore. Sometimes, the line to get through our one-horse town… erm… city… is several horse-and-buggies long.

Oh, you blinked? You missed it. City limits are already passed. Sorry. Guess you will have to turn around down there at the community firehall parking lot, or you can take the backroad through several miles of rolling farms and cars up on blocks – wheels gone missing.

The people? You know New York City? Yeah, we are nothing like them. They are the absolute worst at leaving people to suffer and starve. I mean, you even mention being hungry, and someone will show up with a plate of food. Oh, but they are real bears about their property. Decorating it with fencing and professional landscaping (some of the houses), they cannot stand to have visitors.

Oh yeah, this city is absolutely awful and my favorite thing to do here, is to go to the Cheese Factory in our local Amish and Mennonite community. You have to take the expressway to a very bustling metropolis known as Shelocta, and then a bypass to Smicksburg. Once there, there is a freeway that provides a smooth and hassle-free experience driving to the illustrious Cheese Factory.

The parking lot is shared with bovine and equine companions with specific parking spaces for the equine models.

The entrance to the Cheese Factory is rustic, contemporary at best, and the employees are down to earth, and polite. What we all come for is… the cheese. There is pickle cheese, habanero, jalapeno, olive, sharp, soft, medium, ooey, gooey, lumpy and stringy. Every shape, size, and variety you can imagine is produced from locally sourced dairy (literally right outside in the field next door).

The white gold though is not the storefront, but the processing and packaging area in the back of the retail store. Behind a plexiglass viewing window, you can watch the cheese be made from its base cream.

My favorite part is when they hand out cheese curds to the viewers to watch them curdle under the texture. Me? I love the texture, and happily chomped and squeaked away under the horrified gazes of the others.

I live in a one-horse town surrounded by more one-horse towns. Our trees scrape the skies, and our roads are two-laned. Everyone knows of everyone else, and if something goes awry in the town, there is always a show of support to help pick the fallen back up. While the most exciting thing in our area, to me, is a cheese plant… others may choose one of our local nature parks, our public pool, trails or something else. Regardless, we all find something that we love here, even if the amenities are scattered and strange.

Also… did I mention I am lactose intolerant? Hahahaha