The end-of-summer ice cream ride

Now, you may be aware of the running joke in the moto community that all anyone does is ride to their local barbeque and ice cream joints. I’ve certainly had my share of chuckles. My naive self was convinced that the reason you ride is purely to “feel the wind on your face and feel one with the road, brutha.” So I cynically read through this writer’s story about their trip that ended with celebratory ice cream. But I was curious about the weblink that they included at the end of the article for Pennsylvania’s tourist website.

Setting aside the magazine, I pulled up the link on my phone to find a page featuring adorable kids with ice cream all over their faces, sitting in front of a stereotypical red barn. “Pursue Your Scoops!” it said, with more pictures of baby cows and gratuitous shots of dripping cones. The site supplies downloadable “passports” where you can visit family farms, dairies, and creameries across the state of Pennsylvania and get them stamped.

Now you’ve got my attention! I’ve been a passport addict since childhood. I had a book for state quarters, penny press souvenirs, National Park visits; I definitely had to “catch ‘em all,” Japanese pocket monsters included. Some would call it hoarding, others collecting. I call it the push to get off my high horse and go ride my iron one to eat some homemade ice cream.

The more I perused the website, the more I started craving some ice cream, which was problematic because I was at work and couldn’t just ride off on a whim. I started mentally planning a ride to visit as many farms as possible before the end of the summer. The excitement of completing the challenge of getting my East, West, and South Central Pennsylvania passports stamped far outweighed the irony of living out my favorite motorcycle stereotype. I plugged all 31 farms into a Google Maps list and charted a neat little constellation through Lancaster County, my first conquest.

The ice cream ride begins

The first stop of the day was to Fox Meadows Creamery, which set my expectations very high. Not only did they have two or three cases of classic and inventive flavors, but they had a kitchen using local produce and products from neighboring farms along with a market selling meat, cheeses, and dry goods. And of course they had a view of the fields where all the cows graze, which seems to be a prerequisite for any farm selling ice cream.

It’s very easy to get into the laid-back vibe, even more so when you hop back on the bike with a full belly and the sun is shining and you have nowhere to be anytime soon.

After some blissful, solitary riding through corn fields and past farms where I couldn’t resist waving to the horses and goats, my next two stops were The Milkhouse and Pine View Dairy. Since my lunch had now digested, I foolishly thought I was capable of ordering like a normal person out for a treat. Big mistake. I had let the adrenaline from riding and already-consumed sugar trick me into ordering “single scoops.”

In South Central Pennsylvania, the “single scoop” menu option is severely misadvertised. The whopping mountains of ice cream dished up by high-schoolers behind the counter amount to about a pint in total after they’ve packed on a couple layers and handed it to you. My hopes for getting four passport stamps in a day quickly dwindled after the third creamery. I honestly wasn’t sure I had any room left in me. The temps had climbed to about 95 degrees and I was starting to feel a little queasy.

Thankfully, my last stop was on the way home and I had a longer stretch of riding in between, allowing my stomach some time to settle. Well, as much as it can settle while cruising the infamously bad Pennsylvania backroads on a Harley-Davidson⁠, swerving to avoid potholes, gravel patches, and horse plops.

Pulling into Lapp Family Farms was like discovering a hidden gem tucked among the tiny Lancaster hills. Far from the main roads, their little oasis was cool and shady, thanks to the trees lining the parking area. Pulling in after an hour in the sun wearing all-black gear, I’d almost say that their giant weeping willow tree providing shade was my favorite part of the whole day.

Mercifully, they had the smallest number of flavor options, so my freezer-burnt brain was able to make a quick decision for the first time all day. I grabbed a kid-sized scoop of local black cherry and some homemade venison jerky and collapsed into the rocking chairs on the front porch.

I’m not above admitting that I was tempted to slip the begging farm dog some of my ice cream, because I thought I was too full to finish anything. But at this point in the day, I was well beyond trying to maintain any dignity. Sticky, sweaty, and sun-burnt are usually how you’d describe a full-day’s work of hard manual labor but it just as easily described my fat, dumb, and happy self reclining on a porch, watching the cows come in from the fields for the evening.

I guess you could say that all I gained from an ice-cream crawl was a couple extra pounds and few less dollars. Maybe you could say I succumbed to the marketing ploys of a state government intern trying to grow tourism in Pennsylvania. But I think I gained a deeper, richer understanding of why someone would armor up in riding gear, complete a pre-ride checklist for their motorcycle, and then spend their precious few leisure hours riding through rolling hills and farmlands to simply make a stop at a dairy farm for an ice cream cone to then turn around and ride home.

Why? Because it’s fun.