Pittsburgh- Saturday, March 23, 2024

      This one's for Emma.  She wasn't able to go south with us when we went to the Outer Banks in February.  It's her spring break from college now and she wanted to go somewhere.  She thought about going South by herself or with a small group of friends to some exotic climes.   She decided against that and started looking closer to home.  Somewhere, she learned that there was a film festival in Pittsburgh this weekend.  We said we would take her and drop her off there while we went exploring elsewhere.  We've driven through Pittsburgh before, but we've never stopped here and certainly have never explored the city.  Ultimately, Emma decided that she won't go to the film festival, but since she'd been looking at Pittsburgh, she said she did want to have this weekend away.  So here we are.

     On Friday, we left school and quickly threw our clothes and other things into a suitcase, picked up Abby from daycare and headed west to Erie.  We looked for a place to eat there and found an Eat'n Park.  Julie had stopped there once before with her parents and liked the soup and salad bar.  We didn't realize it when we stopped there, but the Eat'n Park is apparently a Pittsburgh thing, having started there as a drive-in place.  We ate inside tonight though.  After dinner we continued on through the rain and arrived at our hotel a little after 9:00. 

     We were all up pretty early this morning and we went to a little nearby cafe called Jo Jo's for breakfast.  Scott went into a nearby Walmart for some necessities we all needed and Julie went to Starbucks for hers.  From there went drove into Pittsburg and entered the city through the Fort Pitt Tunnel.  It's certainly a dramatic way to enter Pittsburg because as you leave the tunnel, the first thing you see is the skyscrapers and bridges of the downtown area.   We also drove by the tall Cathedral of Learning on the campus of the University of Pittsburgh.  This city is certainly an interesting place.

     We found our way to the Carnegie Museum of Natural History but arrived about an hour before it opened so we had a while to wait before anything happened.  We enjoyed the museum itself, once it opened at 10:00.   Later in the day, Julie said that the museum's halls were "cavernous" and that she preferred a little more directionality in a museum.  There were a couple of times in the day when we found ourselves a little lost and wondering where we were going next.  Once we found the natural history section, we found that the museum starts with a look at the geology of the Pittsburgh and notes that this part of North America was once a tropical rain forest on the equator.  It was at that time that the plants grew that would later become the coal that became the economic foundation of the steel mills that built the city of Pittsburgh later on.

     The dinosaurs were next, and they are probably the biggest attraction for the many families like ours that were visiting.  The displays are pretty impressive and we enjoyed strolling the paths that weave among the skeletons and their dioramas.  Abby was anxious to get to the part where kids were able to dig in the sand to excavate fossils and was disappointed to find out it wasn't open until noon.  She doesn't let things like that go and asked often if we were going back there.  

      Emma is appalled as she is learning something about herself this weekend.  At breakfast, we were telling Abby that apples are good for her, and Daddy told her, "An apple a day keeps the doctor away.  So if you don't like doctors..." then he and Emma said at once, "Throw apples at them!"  Later, at the museum, Emma saw a diorama showing two Eider ducks.  She said that she could take "eider one."  Then again, when we were looking at an exhibit on the search for the Northwest Passage in the Arctic, she began singing the Stan Rogers song.  Each time she was hit with the shocking realization that she seems to be turning into her father.  Dad was proud and laughed very hard each time.

     We spent a little while in the part of the museum called the Discovery Basecamp where there was lots for Abby to touch and explore.  In one chest, she and Emma pulled out a case about animal poop.  Mom had to send a picture of that to Anna to get back at her for all of the weird things we get from her.  We strolled quickly through the halls dedicated to North American animals, African animals, and botany.  Each of these displays was impressively done.  Julie liked finding details like the burrs that were sticking to the moose's legs as he was strolling through a field and the flies gathering on the head of the water buffalo.  

     By this time, Abby was getting hungry and we didn't want a cranky, hangry 4-year old on our hands.  We ended up eating lunch at the "Fossil Fuels Cafe" in the museum.  Scott and Emma went quickly through a display about the problems and techniques used to preserve artifacts from ancient Egypt, a large exhibit about the Arctic and Inuit exhibit, "Bird Hall", and a small maze of rooms on Native Americans, but they skipped the Egyptian room entirely in order to catch up with Mom and Abby who had gone to get the food.  The Carnegie Museum of Art is connected to this museum and admission is included with our tickets, but we were all getting tired and had enough museum for today.  We had a hard night's sleeping last night and Abby was visibly winding down.  After she had a chance to finally dig in the sand for fossils (an experience that seemed to be less than what she had hoped for) and bought a six-foot long blue and purple snake at the gift shop, we returned to the hotel.  Abby was asleep when we arrived.  Mom and Emma went to the nearby IKEA store to browse while Scott stayed at the hotel and watched Abby.

     After naps and rests, we still wanted to "squeeze the day," as Julie says.  We made our way back through the Fort Pitt Tunnel and into Pittsburgh in order to try to go to the Hofbrauhaus.  We have been to a number of them and Scott has always wanted to go here if he came to Pittsburgh.  By the time we got to it, though, it was after 5:00 and very crowded.  We were told there was a 45 minute wait, and it didn't seem worth it.  We looked in the neighborhood for something else.  There was a place called "Pins" but it didn't serve food; it was just an upscale gaming place, and we were getting cranky and hungry.  We went back to where the car was parked and headed back to where our hotel is, near the airport.  Julie had seen a lot of places to eat there and we ended up at a Smokey Bones.  After that, it only made sense for us to call it a night and we went back to the hotel.  Our day had started off eventful, but seemed to go downhill after lunch.  We've got more to see tomorrow though.