Trip to Pittsburgh

Marna and I finally made it to Pittsburgh this past weekend. As some of you know, we've said "we are going to Pittsburgh this weekend" at least a half dozen times. Something always kept us in State College. Our wedding anniversary was the Oct. 2nd, so we were celebrating that and doing one of those "babymoons" we keep reading about.

I took a panoramic picture from the top of Mt. Washington overlooking the city. It is my first attempt at merging several photo's together. I think its from six individual pictures. It works better than I thought. Although because they are so long, its kinda hard to see unless you click on it and open the full version.


Notice all the bridges in the picture - Marna and I probably crossed everyone of them. Mostly unintentionally.

Pittsburgh is a really nice city, although its kind of difficult finding things when you don't have a city map. Saturday morning started out well, we left our hotel in west Pittsburgh and drove downtown to the Strip district for breakfast. The Strip district isn't quite as exciting as it might sound (everyone is clothed), its basically a single street (or "Strip") located by one of the three rivers. There's an outdoor market and it seemed to have a large number of italian restaurants. We ate breakfast at what is said to be the best breakfast place in the city. It was good, although maybe not as good as the Waffle Shop here in State College. The line was shorter though.

From there we wanted to go to an art museum called The Mattress Factory. That's when we got really lost. We must have driven through half of downtown and a good bit of the northern neighborhoods. We stopped at five different places looking for a map. Finally we found one and attempted to work our way back to the city(we were probably 15 miles to north at this point). We ended up deciding to head back to the hotel and regroup for a few minutes before giving it another shot. From the hotel, we pretty much drove straight there. It was well worth the hassle. I thought at least half of the museum had interesting stuff (for me, that's good), the other half I didn't really understand. Or maybe I understood it and just didn't like it. Its pretty hard to tell the difference. The exhibit I liked best was about Alzheimer's and the loss of memory. In the first part of the exhibit, there were family photo's with little descriptions/stories glued to the wall. Each photo/description was connected to each other through a series of linkages (some contained many links, others were pretty isolated). This covered an entire large room, probably several hundred photo's. The connections were interesting to follow and you got a sense that the randomness of the links was somehow significant but it was difficult to completely work out. The second part contained these neuron-looking things that had old family movies playing in the center. I don't think there was much to "get" about this, but it was visually pretty cool looking.

We then went to a maternity store and found Marna some jeans. I was very happy about that since there's plenty of mornings when the lack of clothing is a topic of discussion. We also visited two other baby related stores - a babies R us and another local place I can't remember the name of. We got to push around alot of strollers and shake alot of cribs, so that was useful.

We made it to the Andy Warhol museum as well. Its right downtown (easy to find!) and seven floors large. There was alot of good stuff in there, I learned alot about Warhol that I didn't know before. As Marna said, he did alot more than movie stars and soup cans.

Overall it was a great trip. We are definitely going to try and go back fairly soon because we didn't make it to any of the Carnegie museums and there might be baby-stuff purchases to make.