Oh, By the Way...

 On the recent Condo Week trip to Pennsylvania, I went through the last 4 counties of Indiana. That makes 35 states where I've now been to all the counties. Here's what's left:

Alaska (which has no counties)

California, 3 counties left

Georgia, oodles & gobs of counties left

Montana, 7 counties left

Idaho, 2 counties left

Iowa, 10 counties left

Kentucky, 8 counties left, which I should pass through in a few months

Massachusetts, 2 counties left (both islands)

Michigan, 20 counties left, all in the lower peninsula

Missouri, 1 county left

Nebraska, 10 counties left

North Carolina, 1 county left, which I should pass through in a few months

Oregon, 12 counties left

Tennessee, 3 counties left, which I should pass through in a few months

and Washington, 2 counties left

 

The 2021 Condo Trip: Part III, Post-Condo-Week

 This is the last of 3 posts covering this trip. You really should read them in order. Here's a link to the first part.

The photo album for this entire trip can be viewed here. The pictures are in chronological order, with captions. All the pictures in this post and the succeeding two posts are part of that album.

  AFTER WE LOADED UP our rented Chevy Equinox, we headed down the road to Pittsburgh, by way of Fallingwater, with an unplanned stop at Punxsutawney to see the site of the famous groundhog's annual 15 minutes of fame.

Punxsutawney Phil, said famous groundhog, makes his appearances in Gobbler's Knob, a park area on the east side of town. It's been going on for nearly 140 years now, and Phil is in remarkably good shape for so venerable a celeb. According to sometimes-reliable sources, these appearances usually attracted a couple thousand people until the movie Groundhog Day came out in the early 1990s; after that, and until Covid, the crowds jumped to about ten thousand people. Even though the movie was shot in Illinois.

There ain't nothing going on at Gobbler's Knob in mid-June.

Fallingwater

Maybe this is because everybody who's out for a little tourist travel in that part of Pennsylvania is down the road at Fallingwater. This is the house that Frank Lloyd Wright designed for some of the Pittsburgh elite, the Kaufmann family, who owned a local department store back when those were profitable. They had a cabin on some property up in the hills and wanted a house. They hired Wright, who was known to them because their son was interested in Wright's design theories. In the course of about three years, Wright designed an unarguable masterpiece, Fallingwater, though not a particularly practical one. It, along with a couple of other projects around that time, made Wright the most famous architect in America since H.H. Richardson, and perhaps the most famous ever. At least as famous as Punxsutawney Phil.

The house is set in grounds circumscribed by a "run", which is what Pennsylvanians call a stream that flows down a hill or mountain side (as opposed to the ones that flow along a valley floor).  The grounds have been augmented by the acquisition of adjacent lands going up to the Youghiogheny (pronounced "You-go-HEN-ny") River, and the whole area is heavily wooded. The house sits right over a twenty-foot-high waterfall, ensuring that everything either rusts or leaks. When we visited, workmen were reconstructing the bridge that goes across the run as you approach the house. The many levels of the house (and the guest house, right above it on the hillside) are cantilevered out from the rock, and seem to float. As in most of his famous projects, Wright designed not only the house, but every window and floor and every stick of furniture that went into it. We didn't get to go inside the house -- those tours are booked up well into next month -- but we could see into the rooms, as much of the house's walls are glass.

After Fallingwater, we were heading into Pittsburgh when the realization dawned on us that we were missing the England:Scotland game in the European Championships. We pulled over at what looked like it might be a bar, and I got out to see if there was a TV. No, it was a small grocery store, but there were two guys standing on the front porch. So I asked them if they were locals. Actually, what I said was, "Are y'all f'om 'round here?" and they looked at me for a second as though I'd addressed them in Akkadian. Then the translation kicked in for 'em, and I said I was looking for a sports bar that might have a TV, and that I needed it "right now." It was already well into the match. So the two guys discuss where they might suggest we go, and decide that a certain bar in a nearby town would probably be the closest. And as luck would have it, one of the guys lives right near there and will be happy to lead us to it. So, Yay! we got to watch the second half of perhaps the dullest England:Scotland soccer match since the invention of television. At least the beer was good, and some of the snacks. (Onion rings, yes; poppers, no.)

On to Pittsburgh. By then we were several hours past my paid time at the long-term lot, so I figured I'd have to fork over another seven bucks. Not a prob. Get to the airport and this time was very careful to go into the same parking entrance gate that I'd gone into when I parked -- because we had so much trouble getting to my car the first time, to transfer our luggage to the rental. Well, it seems all the Jersey barriers have been reconfigured, and again we were stuck wandering in circles on all sides of the lot where my car was parked without being able to find a way into it. Finally just had Jeff let us off within walking distance and we agreed to meet at the hotel. There was, luckily, no charge for the additional 3 or 4 hours the car was there; maybe because they figure no one could get to their car twice.

Dinner that night was in what we thought was an Italian place close by the hotel. Turned out to be a loud bar & sandwich place. I didn't care for it. The sandwich bread was some tasteless "Italian" bread they seemed inordinately proud of, and the limp french fries that the sandwich was "served with" were actually on the sandwich as an ingredient. I ended up picking out the edible parts of the sandwich: meat and coleslaw. 

On Saturday we hit the ground running. We started at the "Tower of Learning," the tall Arte Moderne building that is a landmark for Pitt University. Turned out to not be open to the public, because of Covid. So we went on to our next planned stop at the Carnegie Museum of Science and Art. This turned out to be an excellent place to spend a good chunk of daylight. We agreed to meet at a certain time & place, then all four headed for the same exhibit hall, the Architecture room, which was full of fascinating casts of famous and less-famous architectural elements, statues, even whole façades. 

It was wonderful to see such exact replicas of famous sculptures: Venus de Milo; Augustus Princeps; The Discus Thrower; Athena. It was even more fascinating to see replicas of such things as the doors to the Cathedral at Beauvais, a column from the Temple of Vesta at Tivoli, an 11th-Century doorway from a church in Norway, and the entire tomb of Francis II, duke of Brittany, decorated with the twelve apostles (of whom I could recognise only two, Peter and Andrew) and four women representing the attributes of a good ruler.

not a dinosaur

It's a huge museum, roughly equally divided between art and science. There was a long hallway dedicated to birds, populated with some whimsy.  At the far end was an exhibit on the evolution of armor in animals, called "Dinosaur Armor" because that sells but containing more about other animals: crabs, fish, insects, etc. But it did also include ceratopsians and ankylosaurs, and one stegosaur skeleton; so, okay, dinosaurs. And it included several skeletons of carnivorous dinosaurs, because those are always a big draw, even though they don't exhibit any kind of armor. It was more along the lines of, "This is what the armored dinosaurs had to defend against." Of course I loved it.

There were several other rooms dedicated to dinosaurs, and I spent a good deal of time in every one of them. The Carnegie Museum was one of the early institutions participating in the wild rush to collect dinosaur fossils out west in the late 1800s; it got the first T-Rex skull, and complete diplodocus skeletons (which get their own room) and other treasures. Unfortunately (and not unexpectedly) that part of the museum was swarming with excited pre-teen children. Just because I was once one of them makes it no easier to bear now. But I got through the experience without strangling or even stifling a single one of them. I even tried to smile at it all, from time to time.

Our next stop was at the Carnegie Science Center, located along the Allegheny River just above its junction with the Monongahela. This was much less fun than the Science & Art museum. For one thing, it was all very child-oriented, with rooms full of exhibits asking the kinds of questions you ask a six-year-old. I played with some of the robotics exhibits, which were geared to that same age level (and barely functional, after so much rough usage) while waiting for the last planetarium show of the day to open up. The sign said the doors open ten minutes before show time, so I very carefully arrived back there eleven minutes before show time. I was the second person in line. More people came and lined up behind me, and then a woman who worked for the museum came to tell us that the last show was already full. Seems they opened the door up some time before, and then shut them again. Can you guess how I feel about that arrangement? If I'd known they were unable to follow their own procedure, I could have waited there in line instead of piddling with their greasy-handled robot knobs and jejeune exhibits.

Groundhog Day at the Carnegie Science Center

In that mood I went for a look at their model train layout. Not the biggest I've ever seen -- that's in northern Colorado, or a barn in southern Wisconsin -- but close, and detailed, and impressive, except for its inattention to the automotive scenery (too many 1907 Rolls Royces, and 1930s Duesenburg Model J's, not enough Model T's). There were a great many animated features: carnival rides, a Ferris wheel, a roller coaster that ran too infrequently, children swinging in a tree, tiny men cutting wood. After the cars, the trains were the least impressive part of the whole display. (The best part was that the lighting in the room changed from day to night and back.)

I had a brief look around the rest of the museum, but it was all too juvenile to interest me, and there were too many kids running around without adult supervision, and it wasn't that large a museum to begin with. And, of course it didn't help that several things that might have appealed were sold out or closed because of Covid restrictions: the planetarium show, which I've already mentioned; the submarine; the I-Max; the laser show; and so on. I ended up spending a good part of our time there out in the car, reading a backlog of emails that were out of date but still more interesting than seeing yet again how a drop of water gets from my back yard to the ocean.

the famous view

In the early evening we went up the Duquesne Incline, one of two that still run up the steep slope of Mount Washington. These cable-cars have been in operation for more than a century; at one time there were twenty or so running up the mountainside; now there are only two, protected by historical status. We had been told (by that woman at the Pennsylvania Welcome Center on the interstate) that the area at the top of the mountain was filled with bars and restaurants with great views of the city. It was clearly true, except that there weren't all that many bars and all the restaurants with a view were way more expensive than we wanted, and way too dressy for us tired tourists. I mean, valet parking is the norm along Grandview Street, and sweaty people in T-shirts and flip-flops are not the desired clientèle. We ended up, though, having an enjoyable meal at a tavern a few blocks into the neighbourhood of Mt Washington, and then we hung around the Incline station until about dusk, so as to get some pictures of the gorgeous city skyline in the fading light. Worth every penny and every sweaty step. (Maybe next time we come to Pittsburgh, we'll reserve a restaurant table with a view, but I don't really think we missed anything worth experiencing by just showing up.)

Mr Rogers' Monument

Sunday was the best day in Pittsburgh. We started that morning with a visit to a group of monuments lining the Allegheny River by the baseball and football stadiums. The main draw was the monument to Mr Rogers, which Nancy had spotted from the top of Mt Washington the night before. There's also a monument to law enforcement, a confusing monument to the now-destroyed Manchester Bridge, and farther along the shore, monuments to those who served in the 20th-Century wars. (We didn't actually go to those, we just saw them from a distance.) Then we went over to the far side of the Monongahela River (which is apparently known locally as "The Mon") for a sightseeing cruise of the three rivers. The canned commentary delivered on this tour was outstanding, and despite the occasional corny joke, was very informative. 

Some of the nuggets: 

bar boat on the river

• one of the tall buildings downtown is a designated lighthouse for both ships on the river and planes coming in to Pittsburgh. The flashing light on top spells out "Pittsburgh" in morse code
• a famous director (whose name I forget) filmed most of a famous movie (I forget which) in the basement of an old building facing the river; it's a nice-looking building, fully restored
  

• 

  quondam US Steel
  

  the building labelled UPMC used to be the headquarters of US Steel; it was built out of a certain kind of steel made to rust quickly on the outside but not on the inside, for decorative purposes. But because of the acid rain Pittsburgh endured when it was built (in the '80s), it rusted so fast that it rained rust onto the streets, and before US Steel managed to get a protective coating onto the building to stop it, the city had suffered hundreds of thousands of dollars in costs to clean up the rust dust
• the Highmark building was supposed to be as tall as US Steel, but the city said no, too tall. So the architect shaved some floors off, but added the spire, to get back the lost height. The spire is on a spring mount, so it can bend in the wind. People didn't know that, so when the wind first hit it, several blocks of downtown Pittsburgh spontaneously evacuated
• the fountain at the Point has a control device that measures wind speed, and adjusts the water's height to keep it from spraying all the way over to the Wyndham Hotel. When it was dedicated, the important politicians wanted it to shoot up its full 150' height, so it'd look impressive for their publicity photos. The wind, of course, came up, and soaked all those politicians and the Wyndham Hotel.
• There is only one suspension bridge in Pittsburgh, by the same engineer as the Golden Gate. It's considered a trial run.
  
• Pittsburgh has more bridges than any other city in the world, over 400 (We didn't see them all)
  
• There are three identical bridges over the Allegheny, called the Sister Bridges. They're named for Roberto Clemente, Andy Warhol and Rachel Carson, all natives of Pittsburgh
  

why did you wake me?

 After the river cruise, we went to the National Aviary. As Jeff noted, physically it's not nearly as big as you'd expect (it has between five and six hundred kinds of birds) but ... Wow! What a great show! Some of the birds are in large cages, like the eagles and condors, but most are in open rooms that you walk through. They fly right by you, close enough to feel the wind from their wings, and many of them are comfortable enough around people that you could reach out and touch them (although that's not allowed). They also shit on you if you're unlucky. I took way too many pictures; the best of them are in the Google Photos album for this trip, near the end. Click here to see that album.

 

Of all the museums and such we saw in Pittsburgh, the National Aviary is the one I'd most like to go back to. The one I'd least like to go back to ... well, that's a tougher choice. Kind of a tossup, really, between the Phipps Conservatory and Botanical Gardens, and the Pittsburgh Botanical Gardens.

The PBG, located out west of the city, is ... well, I don't know. I didn't really see anything of it. I was hot and tired, and I found myself a bench in a shady spot where I could relax and drain the battery on my cellphone. Sadly, there was a "sound garden" not far away, and plenty of people wanting to bang on the kettle drum and xylophone provided. After half an hour or so I tracked down another place to sit, in the air-conditioned lobby, and stayed there until everyone else was ready to depart. 

 

Dinner that evening was a sort of unplanned thing. It was late, a lot of places were closed, nobody was all that interested in dinner, we just wanted something quick and easy. Wendy's didn't have indoor seating, so we ended up at a Jersey Mike's. Possibly the best Philly Steak sandwich I've ever had. Top two, for sure. Jeff spotted a place a few doors over called The Milk Shake Factory, and went over there for his drink. After our sandwiches, we went to play mini-golf somewhere about 30 minutes east of where we were, at an interesting little old-fashioned course called Forsyth's. At some point early on, Jeff decided he'd left his credit card at the Milk Shake Factory. He called, but they couldn't find it. He checked all the obvious places, of course, and was sufficiently distracted by the matter for me to handily beat his score at mini-golf. Then I took a fall on the 16th hole and banged my shin pretty good. Nancy & Sherry played a second round, Jeff kept score, and I sat down to drain my cellphone battery again. 

 

Jeff found his credit card, by the way; I think he said he'd put it back in his billfold, but in the wrong place. 

The Incident at Jumonville, by Gerry Embleton

On our last day, we went first to the Fort Pitt Museum, at the Point. This small museum covers the history of the Fort and the surrounding country in the years when the fort was active: the French & Indian War, the Revolution, and the early decades of the United States. Filled in a lot of gaps in my knowledge about those events. The French & Indian War, especially, was never much covered in the history classes I took, and it's not something that has every piqued my interest for reading. That may change. I'm now curious to learn more about the incident at Jumonville Glen, for one thing; and the convoluted relationships among the French, the British, and the various local tribes could put that on the table for future reading, too. Plenty of blame to go around, it seems.

vertical wind turbine

Lastly, we did the Phipps Conservatory and Botanical Gardens. I hated it. I'd told Sherry before the trip that we could see the Phipps or the Pittsburgh Botanical Gardens, but I didn't want to go to both. I was outvoted, and was only slightly happier about it than the average Trump voter is about the last election. (Or are they all below average?) It was hot -- intentionally so: the plants like it that way -- and there were all these damn noisy Troll statues placed around to attract rugrats. Half the place is closed, and management's idea of social distancing makes the whole god-damn thing a one-way maze. The flowers were pretty. The stuff out back about carbon-footprint reduction was interesting. Some of the plants were fake; I don't know why, but trying to pick them out kept my interest up through two rooms of the conservatory.  The food in the cafeteria was thoroughly New Age, mostly gluten-free and vegan and uninteresting and overpriced. I had a cup of thin, bland soup and a serving of the moral smugness that comes from pointed sacrifice.

The drive home to Texas was uneventful. Three days on the freeway were interrupted only by a traffic jam in Cincinnatti and the need to stop at a bar in Kentucky for a pair of soccer matches; and the only side-trip was a brief search for a truly disappointing monument to the Everly Brothers.

And I've decided that it's pointless taking the convertible on trips like this. If we'd left on Saturday instead of Sunday, it might have been different (though I doubt it). As it was, of the entire 2400 mile trip up to and back from Pittsburgh, only about 200 miles was off-freeway, and it rained hard for half that distance. Only about 40 miles of that 200 was on backroads where it would have been nice to have the top down. It rained most of that time. We put the top down only once, briefly. (I also had it down for a pleasant 16-mile round trip to the bank and the gas station in the Pittsburgh suburbs. That hardly makes up for anything.) And, of course, the Subaru gets better mileage and uses regular gas, and we probably could have dispensed with the rental SUV, had I chosen to take it. 

Years ago, I took my old Nissan on the condo trip to San Diego, with Sherry. She had to work, though, so she flew home, while I drove alone across the West. I remember driving Highway 12 in Southern Utah and feeling pained that I wasn't in my little convertible on such a beautiful road, and decided then that I wouldn't do that again. But now she's retired, which means she goes with me both ways, which means the dog stays in the kennel until we get home. Which means we don't wander much. Which means there's no point in taking the convertible.

The 2021 Condo Trip, Part II: The Main Event

 This is the second of 3 posts covering this trip. You really should read them in order. Here's a link to the first part.

The photo album for this entire trip can be viewed here. The pictures are in chronological order, with captions. All the pictures in this post and the succeeding two posts are part of that album.

  MY FRIEND KILBY lives in southeastern Pennsylvania, and I'd invited him and his wife to join us for any or all of our condo week. "Dubois?" he said; "There's nothing to do up there." But he came anyway, just for an overnight visit (though his wife stayed home -- dog-sitter unavailable, a completely valid excuse with this group of tourists). 

Kilby is both right and wrong about this area. DuBois itself, a town of about 7,000 people, is as dull as a central Pennsylvania burg can be in the reflected glow of a never-very-bright past. They had their big local celebration the first weekend we were here, and we would not have known it had we not tried to get to a local supermarket; that block of thoroughfare was closed for the fireworks show.

But DuBois sits amid miles and miles of gorgeous heavily-forested high rolling hills (called mountains, but let's be real here), and those forests contain plenty to keep jaded city folk happy as a tornado in a trailer park.

where's that Sasquatch?

Normally we start our Condo trips with a day-long discussion of what to do when, but this time we had to put it off, because there was a "must" event going on that day and we couldn't miss it: the First Annual Forest County Sasquatch Hunt and Bigfoot-Calling Contest, taking place in Marienville, a couple of hours north of DuBois, in the Adirondack National Forest. We spent the entire day roaming around the forest on a scavenger hunt, looking for life-sized cutouts of the famously reclusive critter placed around the area. One was easy to find, mounted on the side of the old train station (although we drove past it three times), while the rest were more or less hidden among the trees. We found eight of the ten cutouts; the other two were west of town, and since we didn't know the local road names, we had no clue which area to look in. Still, lots of fun, and such pretty scenery. We grabbed dinner from a barbecue vendor at the festival proper in town (not that good, but then it's Pennsylvania, not Kansas City and certainly not Texas) and listened to the Sasquatch Calling competition before heading back, happy and tired, to DuBois.

Kilby came up the next morning, and after introductions and lunch at the nearby Station 101, we headed off to Horseshoe Curve, where the Pennsylvania Railroad laid its route through the mountains. It's one of the busiest stretches of railroad in the country. During our visit -- not that long a time -- four extremely long trains passed through, and there were a number of people there to witness it. It's a Famous Place and popular with tourists and locals alike. There's a small museum to round out the trainspotting experience.

Bilger's Rocks

fat-man squeeze

The next day, after Kilby had headed off home to the Amish Country, we went back in that same direction, towards Altoona, to clamber around on Bilger's Rocks. These are some privately-owned granite rocks, open to the public and kept free of government safety measures: no railings, no smoothing of paths through the rocks, no warning signs. Just rocks, and trees, and your own instincts on how to get to the top. It had rained hard just before we got there, and the flat ground around the parking area was soggy, swampy even, but the drops falling from the trees, and the cool dampness of the air, just made the experience all the more fun. It's a great place to feel like kids again.

On Tuesday, we made a circuit through the northern parts of Pennsylvania. First stop was the Kinzua Sky Bridge, an observation deck built on the remnants of a railroad trestle that was taken down by a tornado in 2003. From 300 feet in the air, you can look down on the twisted remains of a dozen towers that once held up the rail trestle.

Kinzua Sky Bridge

From there we hit the Zippo Lighter company's museum in Bradford. I made it as far as the movie theater, where they show a 2-minute history of the company. I fell asleep there, and saw nothing of the museum before everyone else was ready to go. We swung by the Serenity Glass Park in Port Allegheny, which was billed as "celebrating the history of glass." Actually it was all about glass block manufacture, which is much less interesting. The park -- the size of one city building lot -- was definitely not worth the 20-minute-each-way drive to get there. 

Our last stop was the Smethport Mansion District. In the 1880s and 1890s, Smethport was one of the wealthiest towns in the country, and was home to one of the wealthiest men in the land: Harry Hamlin, banker extraordinaire. His bank is still around, a shadow of its former self; so is his house, and the houses of everyone related to him or closely involved with his business. And a few others. 

To be perfectly candid, few of these houses were really impressive enough to call "mansions". Most were the sort of medium-large Victorian houses one sees in every town of sufficient age. A number of Smethport's were in need of a hefty dose of TLC, but a few were well-maintained and recently restored. I walked nearly the entire half-mile of the "District" before I decided I should take a picture or two, and even then only to be able to prove I was there. 

best view

We spent all of Wednesday in one place, Pine Creek Gorge. Billed as "Pennsylvania's Grand Canyon," it's not a canyon at all, but a valley, carved by glaciers. There's a Rim Trail on the western side, from which one can see very little of the valley, as the underbrush on the hillside has been allowed to grow up far enough to block the views. On the eastern side, trails run down from top to bottom, and there's a Rail Trail, a former railway bed that runs the entire length of the valley, some 40 miles. We hiked the Turkey Trail, which passes two waterfalls on its way down. Jeff and I turned back after the first waterfall; Sherry and Nancy went on to the second, but didn't go quite all the way down.

On the way back to DuBois, we stopped near Benezette to have a look at a few of the elk that form large herds in north-central Pennsylvania Shortly after that, an elk on the roadside decided to have an up-close look at us, but we just managed to avoid too close an encounter.

On Thursday, our last full day of Condo Week, we drove over to Clearfield, the county seat, to see the Grice Clearview Community Museum, an odd collection of trophy animals and old cars, all jammed higgledy-piggledy into a warehouse-style building with a huge collection of die-cast toys and a replica of the Sinclair service station that started the Grice family's fortunes. 

1947 Crosley

Almost every antique automobile museum in the country began as one person's personal collection, and no matter how long that person's been gone, the collection still reflects his own personal taste. (I don't know of any where the original collector was a woman.) Mr. Grice's tastes tend toward the flamboyant. While most of the cars are traditional American vehicles from the 1930s to the 1980s, with emphasis on Fords and Chevys, there is an unusual number of oddities, apparently collected in all seriousness: a Volkswagen Beetle modified with a Rolls-Royce grille (I remember when those were popular, back in the '60s); a Cadillac Eldorado with longhorn hood ornament, a continental kit on the back and two side-mounted spare-tire compartments; a Chevy Nomad station wagon modified into a pickup truck; a Stutz Blackhawk reboot from the 1970s. These are the vehicles that give the collection its peculiar flavour -- that, and the weird juxtaposition of stuffed game animals. This collection is not that of a wealthy sophisticate collecting cars with an eye toward future value; this is the collection of a wealthy but simple man who could afford to indulge his own whims. (He also collected thousands of die-cast automobile models; if I wanted to fault his tastes, it would be because I found only one Jaguar among the lot of them, and none among the full-size car collection!)

tree growing out of a rock several feet off the ground

We left the Grice Museum and, after grabbing lunch at a nice little diner down the road, Billie's, we headed over the other side of DuBois, to a place we'd heard about from the woman in the condo next to ours: Cook Forest. This state park features an area of virgin forest -- unusual in heavily-logged Pennsylvania. It was quite an exertion for a group of people nearing seven decades on earth; well, for some of them, anyway.
The hike we chose started with a climb -- a pretty steep climb -- of about 250 feet, but after that it was fairly level, and about two and a half miles all together, ending with a "swinging bridge" that bounced more than swung.

We closed out our Condo Week with the Once-a-Year Bowling League, this time at DuBois Lanes, just about the only thing we did in the town that was our home base for the week. I bowled the worst two games of my entire life, so there's nothing to report.

The 2021 Condo Trip, Part I: the Pre-Trip

The photo album for this entire trip can be viewed here. The pictures are in chronological order, with captions. All the pictures in this post and the succeeding two posts are part of that album.

 THE PLAN, ORIGINALLY, was to leave San Antonio on Saturday, June 5, and drive to Pittsburgh in a leisurely fashion, with a number of stops along the way to stretch legs and see the odd second-tier tourist attraction. Saturday was the chosen day because we had to take Carly to the kennel that day, as they weren't open on Sundays. And once the dog's away, there's no point hanging around at home, is there?

But Sherry's team had a soccer match scheduled for Sunday, and she doesn't miss those if she can help it. So I revised the trip plan into a slightly less leisurely route, which would allow us to still reach Pittsburgh at the proper time while keeping the highlights of the original trip intact. Basically, we cut out our planned sightseeing in Little Rock, and cut back on what we would see in St Louis. We still had a full day of sightseeing there, and it turns out that a number of the planned destinations there were closed anyway. 

I don't feel like we really missed much. I'll go back to Little Rock some day, maybe by myself, and see such sights as there are. It'll be an excuse to drive the backroads of East Texas again, and southern Arkansas. 

View from the glass bathroom

The soccer game, though, was cancelled late Saturday night, because of the heavy rain that we've been having in town for the past five or six weeks. Not really a surprise, but still a disappointment. So we ended up leaving around 9AM on Sunday. The weather was pretty good, as was the traffic -- even through Austin, which is usually a bottleneck no matter the day of the week. We got off the freeway in Temple and headed over to the East Texas Arboretum in Athens for an hour or two. I was surprised to find that there was very little about the trees there, but the flowers were beautiful.

After that, we headed straight up to Sulpher Springs for the World Famous Glass Bathrooms. Located on the courthouse square, these two public restrooms are built out of one-way glass. I can now assure you that using them, with all those little kids running around and playing in the adjacent fountains, is a disorienting experience.

We spent that first night in Texarkana, at a Ramada Inn on Stateline Avenue near the interstate. Checking in was an ordeal, as I did not speak Malay and the clerk didn't speak English (turned out that the two regular desk clerks had gone to fetch their dinner, and one of them had lost his wallet). The room was reasonably clean and the price was good, though there were some issues: no hand towels, no bath mat (and a very slippery bathroom floor), a fire alarm (false alarm) just before ten p.m., a security door that wouldn't lock, and a housekeeper who looked like he was booked to play Suspicious Character Number Two on some true-crime series. And yet I got a better night's sleep than I had gotten in months. Go figure.

Elephant Rocks

We blew through Arkansas without seeing anything but highway and rain, and got to our next planned stop at a good hour, and just beyond the rain. That was Elephant Rocks State Park, in southern Missouri, where there's an eroded granite outcropping.  It's a short, easy walk around the outcrop, and we enjoyed the view. The rocks themselves are interesting to see, as are the elaborate graffiti carved into them by 19th-Century miners.

From there it was only an hour and a half to St Louis, by way of Washington County (the next-to-last Missouri county for me). We checked into our hotel in Illinois and spent the evening decompressing, with dinner at a mediocre Italian place close by.

an example of the better stuff

The next day, Monday, we hit three main sights. First was the Laumeier Sculpture Garden, a hundred-acre property filled with elaborate yard art and a few pieces of actual art. In the first category were: the drum off a cement truck; two angular orange creatures humping; a canvas bag hanging from a tree, and many, many less noteworthy chunks of garbage. It was clear to me that the "vision" of the long-time director leaned toward the fatuous.

The second category was represented by a giant eyeball, very similar to the one we saw in Dallas last year; a flat, white shape that put me in mind of a leaf or a Viking ship; some orange-painted oil barrels arranged to suggest a Greek temple; steel balls representing certain molecules and forming a baloon-animal poodle; and steel strings tied in knots. Sadly, even the interesting pieces prompted eye-rolling if you read the placards describing the work. Artists should not be allowed to write descriptions, and they should never be quoted on the subject. Meaningless drivel, every word of it.

After the Sculpture Garden we went to the Missouri Botanical Garden. (I will tell you now that, between these two venues, I did a whole lot more walking than I'd planned, and there was more to come.) The Mo Bo is the oldest botanical garden in the US, and probably the best I've ever seen. (Not that I've seen that many: San Antonio's, Corpus Christi's and Fort Worth's are pretty much the whole list.)

Water lilies

 There were a few parts of the garden that were closed, but what remained was interesting almost to the point of being overwhelming. And it goes without saying that Sherry enjoyed everything many times more than I did. I just thought it was all pretty, and well-designed, and that the sculpture in the garden was orders of magnitude better than the sculpture in the sculpture garden had been. There was a temporary exhibition of "origami" sculptures being shown, ranging from the whimsical squirrel-eying-acorn to the surreal horse-balancing-scissors to the simply beautiful leaf-caterpillar-butterfly; but there were also elegantly beautiful permanent sculptures than had evocative power far greater than the oil-barrel temple that is the Laumeier's "signature" work.

From the Garden, we went on to our last must-see stop of the day, the Old Chain of Rocks Bridge. Built in 1922, this bridge used to carry Route 66, the "Mother Road," across the Mississippi River. It was replaced in the 1960s, but rather than being torn down, it was left up for bicycle and pedestrian use. So we could walk all the way across the Mississippi River from Chouteau Island on the Illinois side to the West Bank in Missouri. Along the way we could look out on the St Louis skyline in the distance; the actual Chain of Rocks, an underwater ledge that causes the river to run rough just below the bridge (and forces all the river traffic into a channel east of Chouteau Island); and two old water-intake towers, standing sentinel on pedestals. They look like wonderful party venues, except for being pretty much inaccessible.

Water intakes and the Chain of Rocks

That night we had dinner at a charming little tavern in "downtown" Collinsville, Illinois, where we were staying; and in the morning, we set out across Illinois and into Indiana, where we wandered properly, and as a result I'm able to cross Indiana off my county-counting list. The last county came right after we stopped in Alexandria to set the world's record by putting the 27,334th coat on the World's Largest Ball of Paint.

World's Largest Ball of Paint, before we set a new record

 

We spent the night in Lima, Ohio, where we got to see the US Women's National Team beat Portugal in a surprisingly close match. Then it was on to Cleveland, home of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, where we spent several hours. The exhibit starts with "influences" -- jazz, gospel, country music of the 1920s and 1930s -- then gets into true Rock & Roll of the '50s and early 60s; the rock music of the 60s and 70s -- my kind of music:

a typical exhibit

Surfer music, the Beatles, the English Invasion, the San Francisco sound (but not much about folk-rock), Then, in an effort (I suppose) to remain relevant, it gets into all the increasingly weird progeny of Rock & Roll, starting with Disco and going on through all the fragmented variations of the 80s and 90s -- grunge, punk, New Age, anything at all (except reggae, for some reason) -- before lapsing into Hip Hop. Music beloved by many people, fer sure fer sure, but not Rock & Roll. The exhibits consist largely of clothing and instruments contributed by the artists, very much like every variety of Hall of Fame you've ever seen. The Beatles, the Stones, Hendrix and Elvis get slightly larger exhibits than your run-of-the-mill superstars, who are mostly relegated to a closet-sized display large enough for two guitars and a couple of shirts or jump suits. Those things are interesting when they're Michael Jackson's sequined glove or Prince's purple suit, but beyond that, they're kind of ho-hum. The museum also had some booths where you could listen to music, and I could have stayed in there for hours and hours, hearing one great song after another; but there were only four booths, and lots of people waiting for their chance to try it; and I did have other places to go, other things to see.

On Thursday afternoon, we cruised out of Cleveland in the pouring rain. On an impulse, we stopped at the Pennsylvania Welcome Center to pick up some brochures, and absolutely made the attendant's day. First she suggested that most people went to see the elk herds, or the "Grand Canyon", I said we had a week, so maybe we'd do both. Well! You've never seen anyone so excited. She came out of her booth and started pulling out brochures and making recommendations so fast we couldn't follow. We left with a sack full of cards and pamphlets and booklets, so many that, now, we're having a hard time remembering which is which.

the fountain at Point State Park

The rain let up as we drove into Pittsburgh, where I'd decided to splurge with a luxurious suite overlooking Point State Park, the spot where the city's Three Rivers come together. Actually, our room faced the other way, toward Market Square, but since we didn't really look out the window we didn't much care. We walked down to that square for dinner at a brew pub so that we could watch the US Men's National Team in a convincing 4:0 win over Costa Rica. Artisans and vendors were setting up booths in Point State Park for a ten-day-long annual festival that'll still be going on when we get back to town after Condo Week. The local skinny is that this particular festival guarantees ten days of rain, and so far (I'm writing this on Monday) it's holding true to form. But it's an intermittent rain, and not the kind that ruins a vacation.

On Friday morning we walked up the street to a breakfast place Sherry found that came with very strong ratings. I don't know why. There was nothing wrong with the place, but there was nothing exceptional about it either. If it were a college student it'd be earning Solid B's. But it was a nice stroll, and afterwards we wandered farther up the hill to what turned out to be the county courts building and jail, which looked exactly like a 19th-Century jail, except that now it's county offices with a pleasant courtyard where the prisoners' yard used to be. 

After that, we still had some time to kill before going out to the airport to meet up with Nancy & Jeff. I wanted to get some more cash out, and there was a bank branch with a (nonfunctional) drive-through just across the Allegheny River. When we got there, we saw a sign for one of the small museums we were interested in; it was across the street from the bank. But even though it should have been open, according to the posted hours, it wasn't. A man loitering nearby told us the guy who ran it wouldn't be in for a while because he'd had dental surgery that morning. We decided not to wait, mainly because it was a kind of sketchy neighbourhood. Instead, we drove over to the Frick Car & Carriage Museum, in a leafier part of town.

Stanley Steamer's steam whistle

The Frick is a small auto museum, just two rooms, but it had some nice vehicles on display: a 1932 Cadillac Phaeton and a 1911 Stanley Steamer were the stars of the show, but there was also a 1940 American Bantam, a 1931 Lincoln, a post-war DeSoto, a 1928 Stutz Blackhawk, a Model T, a Model A, and a display of hood ornaments, tracing their history from the first radiator temperature gauge to the 1950s, when all the purdy nekkid ladies morphed into jet planes and people lost interest.

1932 Cadillac Phaeton

After lunch at our third-choice restaurant (first choice: long wait; second choice, not yet open), we headed for the airport, way out in the hills west of the city. I'd made a reservation for a space in the long-term parking lot, to leave my car there while we did our Condo Week with a rented SUV. Turns out there are three kinds of long-term parking, and I didn't know which one I'd made a reservation for. Just guessed (guessed the cheapest, of course) and got lucky. The route from the entry gate to the parking area was long and winding, with Jersey barriers set up to take us about a mile and a half (or 30 yards as the crow flies) to where we could leave the car. We left our stuff in the car, figuring it'd be easier to just bring the SUV to that spot and transfer everything.

Nancy & Jeff's flight had been changed and was getting in an hour later than we'd planned, so we had plenty of time to find the baggage claim. It was a pretty good walk from the car, but it's surprising how small the Pittsburgh airport is. It appears to only have one terminal, but about 16 baggage claim carousels. (I compare that to San Antonio's three terminals with three baggage claim carousels.) 

Nancy & Jeff arrived, their bags arrived at almost the same time, and the rent-a-car agency was close by. We did the paperwork and found our vehicle and went back to my car ... except we couldn't get to it. We drove all over the various long-term lots, but the one I was parked in seemed to be guarded by fences and barriers and berms. We finally got there by going the wrong way through an intersection. Fortunately, the first hour in long-term parking is free.

Fully laden, we wound our way through narrow streets to the freeway that would take us to our condo north of DuBois, a couple of hours away.