Monday, March 24, 2008

The Snowstorm Roadtrip

Posted by Laura / 2 comments » / , architecture, parents, people, pittsburgh, travel, trip

As we’ve done several times in the past, on Friday night, Johnathan and I decided that we were bored. We hadn’t gone on a trip since we went to Columbus on February 25, and we were itching. After brief discussion, we decided that we’d drive somewhere that only took us about three hours to get there in any given direction. Johnathan ruled out going into Michigan and I ruled out staying in Ohio, so that left us going east. We ended up deciding on Pittsburgh. Why? Well… because we felt like it. There was no real logic involved as we decided to make our trip out somewhere, but we were going to a city that we’d never seen before to do something.

To our enormous luck, we were greeted with heavy snow as we were heading out. I was going to drive at first, but since I’ve not driven in snow much, after we did a bit of experimentation in my car in a mostly empty parking lot, Johnathan took over. We both agreed it was just safer that way. So, after a stop for coffee, we were on our way to Pittsburgh.

The drive out, at first, was a bit iffy. The snow was coming down pretty quickly, and if the people weren’t driving randomly over the lanes as if they couldn’t see the lines (which was sometimes actually the case), they were driving as if the roads were completely clear. Before we really got out of Ohio, though, we seemed to have passed the storm by, and the snow tapered off to nothing. By the time we got to Pennsylvania, we were on clear roads. The new dilemma was dealing with the skinnier roads on the Pennsylvania turnpike. It wasn’t as bad as the snow, though, and we managed to get fairly close to Pittsburgh before we decided to stop for the night.

We stopped for the night at a Holiday Inn Express in Cranberry, PA. I was pretty pleased about stopping there, mostly because the place was called Cranberry, and come on – that’s a cool name! We’ve had good experience with staying at Holiday Inn Express in the past as well, and since they weren’t charging overly exorbitant fees, we bunked out for the night in a glorious king sized bed. I can’t wait until we can get a new bed, because that was one night of glorious sleep!

In the morning, we got up and had some breakfast (free breakfast anyone?), then decided to make plans for the day. A quick search brought us information about an incline railroad and a museum. We decided that both would be good stops for us. The plan was to go to the museum, have lunch, go to the railroad, have dinner, then head home.

As we drove in to Pittsburgh to get to the museum, I was struck by the city itself. Pittsburgh is less flat than Cleveland and although it has the same problems that Cleveland can have with the empty trees, it also has a smattering of evergreens, which add some color to an otherwise winterized city. I was struck even more by the architecture, new and old, that was prominent the closer into the city we got. There was a bold yellow bridge which Johnathan and I both fell in love with, old buildings which had been repurposed, and some which still seemed to be used for their original purpose. Houses, tall buildings and sculptures were all over the place and I was absolutely in love. If nothing else, I want to go back just to look at things and possibly take pictures of all of the gorgeous buildings. We got to the museum and made it inside, all the while admiring the large glass walls and the interesting stairs on the way in. The museum’s website was out of date so we ended up spending almost double what we anticipated spending on admission to the two museums (one was a natural history museum and the other an art museum). One thing we did not bargain for was the fact that it was a Saturday, ostensibly during spring break, and there were parents with small children all over the place. Now, at a Children’s Museum, I would expect this, but at an Art and Natural History museum it seemed out of place, particularly the ones who were clearly too young to be able to read the exhibits. By the time we finished admiring the rock, fossils, minerals and gemstones, I was done fighting with people. I had been backed into, stepped on, cut in front of, pushed and generally ignored as if I had no right to be walking down the middle area of the museum. Parents have every right to take their children to a museum – I would encourage it – but that is no excuse not to pay due attention to them. We swung through the architecture exhibit, which was interesting, even though it was only recreations of famous buildings and architecture artworks. It calmed me down a little bit to fawn over the various pieces in that hall. By the time we got out of the parking lot and started to find a place for lunch, I was feeling a little bit better still. The problem then was held in the fact that I was the one driving and we were about to embark in downtown Pittsburgh. After the fact, Johnathan decided that henceforth, he would drive downtown in cities where applicable and I could drive in smaller places and on highways, but by the time we found ourselves driving down a market area in the middle of a Saturday market day, it was too late to switch. Our first stop was an Indian restaurant named India Oven or something like that. We never did find it, so we picked another one. Since I’d already gotten into my head that I wanted Indian food, we reset the GPS to take us to a place called India Palace. We did eventually find it, though it took us a while to find parking. By the time we got down there, we were getting fairly hungry. We admired the door for a moment, spying happily a sign that said “We are now open on Saturdays!” and tried the door. Huh, locked. We tried the other one. Also locked. So much for being open on Saturday… There was another place just around the corner called Six Penn and after perusing the menu we decided they looked good for lunch. To our dismay, we found that they were also closed. They didn’t open until 3PM on Saturdays. Well, shoot. We ended up at some little pizza place that had good crust and strong spices which really wasn’t part of the plan at all. After that, I was just frustrated enough with the restaurants not being open, the traffic (people in Pittsburgh don’t adhere to cars turning right having the right of way and pedestrians have invisible diagonal crosswalks), and the parents displaying a lack of parenting at the museum that I was just done. Johnathan hopped into the driver’s seat and we started to head out of Pittsburgh. One real advantage was that I was able to admire the architecture even more on the way out, admire the bridges and everything that I had only been able to glance at on the way in due to the fact that, you know, I was driving.

On the way home, we decided we’d take a detour into Erie, PA since it wouldn’t put us too far out of the way and would get us home at a reasonable hour. Erie, we found, was fairly small, fairly quaint, and, to be perfectly honest, practically dead. We stopped in to see if there was anything to do and to get some coffee, and as it turned out, the place we chose from the GPS (Smokey Joe’s Coffee House or something like that), didn’t actually serve much by way of coffee, though they did do pizza and sandwiches. Well, shoot! We got a ham and swiss sub sandwich to split and then headed out. The first exit we hit that had a gas station, we stopped and got some energy drinks for the rest of the trip home, and then made our way back into Cleveland. I drove on the way home, and it was relatively painless the whole way with the exception of a red mustang which just did not want to let me over, despite my giving ample notice with my signal and coming over just as anyone would normally do. I had to end up jerking into the lane lest he speed past me and make me unable to change lanes for quite a while. As it turned out, sometime after we saw him speeding past us and weaving through traffic, he got pulled over. Poetic justice! I hope that cop gave him a good-sized ticket because he was really being a jerky driver.

We got home at about 8PM and the cats looked fairly nonchalant about the fact that we’d been gone almost 24 hours. They didn’t even appear to miss us. Oh well! I think the final decision was that the trip wasn’t all that great, but that it was better than our excursion to Denver during my move, and that we’d both like to go back and visit Pittsburgh again sometime, perhaps with more of a plan and hopefully better circumstances surrounding us in regards to recreation and restaurants. I think Pittsburgh has potential to entertain both of us, so I look forward to going back someday.

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