Mature Life Features

. . .and coming up are a social hour Tuesday at 3:30 p.m.

for everyone marking birthdays this month

followed by an Activity Review meeting at 4:30

then there’s the Talking Stick Casino outing

departure at noon Thursday

and the Goldfield Excursion leaving Verena at noon Friday.

Just some of the goings-on squeezed in between everything else.

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It’s well and widely known that babies are delivered by storks,

but has anyone ever seen a heavy kid dropped off by a crane.

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Save a Buck in Bucks County

“If you can’t find it at Rice’s Market, you can’t find it anywhere,” we were told before we visited this bustling Babylon of bargains in New Hope, PA.

Proclaimed to be “the biggest flea market in the whole world,” it’s within a two-hour drive of Manhattan, Baltimore, Atlantic City and Philadelphia. Among our bargains were a knapsack and several eel-skin wallets (for gifts) for less than one-third the price we had seen in retail stores.

Rice’s Market opened more than a century ago a dozen miles from the New Jersey border in a pocket of eastern Pennsylvania’s Bucks’ County that is packed with pastoral land and crisscrossed by country roads.

This mecca for black-belt shoppers, bargain hunters and browsers is less than an hour away from Reading, the city that is to outlet shopping what Bethlehem is to Christianity.

But Bucks County is more than a magnet for shoppers. It became one of the nation’s first destinations to take aim at the ecotourism market by promoting the envi­ronment and tourism in cooper­ation with the National Trust for Historic Preservation.

Some of the millions of visitors who flock to the Liberty Bell-Independence Hall complex in downtown Philadelphia take the time to relax out here among the few remaining vestiges of colonial America. While America’s future was charted in the Pennsylvania state house, the nation’s past is preserved in customs, traditions and historic sites throughout this region that has become a getaway for ur­ban-bound residents of such metropolitan complexes as Phil­adelphia, New York, and Wash­ington, D.C.

 Bucks County rolls some 50 miles up the Delaware Valley from the northern rim of Phila­delphia County. William Penn made his home here more than 300 years ago. It also features the 19th century resi­dence of author Pearl S. Buck, who won both the Nobel and Pulitzer prizes. Bucks County is the sort of place you can spend a jingle-bells Christmas or a sun-speck­led summer vacation.

Doylestown, the governmental seat and “capital” of this county peppered with bed-and-break­fasts that remind you of grandma’s house, is the site of the intriguing 44-room Henry Chapman Mercer home. It was made of poured concrete shortly after the turn of the century as a showplace for the exotic and eclectic Mercer-designed-and-made wall and floor tiles that line corridors winding through several floors from the main hall’s dozen exits.

Less than 30 minutes away is Washington’s Crossing, where the general who was to become our first president led his troops across the Delaware River on a cold Christmas Day before the Battle of Trenton.

Another plus for this region is the fact that it’s perched on the edge of Mennonite country, with its eye-catching quilts and home-made mouth-watering foods such as shoo-fly pie.