Northeast Road Trip, Part 2

Our trip to the Northeast was one of the very few trips that Kim and I have taken where I did most of the planning, and for that reason I am frankly astounded that it turned out well.

I’m not the planner in this outfit. I tend to get overwhelmed by all the finicky little details and then one of two things happens: either I throw up my hands and decide just to stay home – which I also enjoy doing, so it’s not so much a sacrifice as it is an opportunity cost and those are easy to ignore – or I plunge ahead and make plans that just … sort of … don’t … work out … very well. Plus, while this all sounded like a great idea in March, when the semester was young and I was full of energy, by the time we got to May and finals were over it seemed like a lot to take on.

But we went and it was lovely, so there you have it. Lesson learned.

We left on a Saturday morning, heading east along this nation’s mighty interstate system with all due speed and efficiency until we got to Chicago, whereupon everything ground to a halt for a while because Chicago. Rush hour starts at 4am in that city and lasts for 23 hours and 57 minutes (five minutes less on weekends). There is always construction, with posted speed limits that not even the cops pay any attention to. It’s usually raining, in my experience. And the entrance from I-290 to I-294 (two major interstate highways, you will note) is exactly one lane wide and has an approach lane that is maybe four car-lengths long.

So that took a while.

But we made it through and eventually found our way across both Indiana (a flat state with off-putting rest stops) and Ohio (a flat state with nice rest stops) to get to Pittsburgh, where our friends Mike and Krista live. Mike was chaperoning his students’ prom when we got there because he is a Good Person, so we had dinner on the back porch with Krista and enjoyed our conversation until Mike got home, whereupon we continued to enjoy our conversation only now with all four of us.

We had breakfast the next day at Pamela’s, which has the world’s best breakfast potatoes. I did not get them, alas, but Kim did so I know this now. In fairness, the French toast was also good. As was the décor and the company.

Our big expedition that day was to the Carrie Furnace.

The Pittsburgh metro area, for those of you whose historical memory is measured in minutes, was once one of the biggest centers of steel manufacturing in the world. It was the focus of the region’s economy and it has shaped the culture of the place down to the present day. It’s pretty much all gone now, of course – the air is cleaner and the city has moved on to other industries – but here and there you can find remnants.

The Carrie Furnace – apparently they named these things after the wives of prominent management officials in the steel mills, because what could possibly be more romantic naming a vast fume-belching industrial facility for your sweetheart? – is one of the last remaining bits of the old Homestead Works just outside of the city and across the river from the Furnace. It was built in the late 19th century and abandoned in the early 1980s – they literally just turned the key and left – and eventually most of the buildings on the site were torn down for scrap and the rest were the province of bored kids, random graffiti taggers, and the occasional scavenger. Eventually the surviving structures were taken over by what is essentially an arts cooperative and turned into a heritage site that preserves not only the steel mill history of the place but also the art that followed.

You get a hard hat and a bottle of water, and they take you around the outside of the surviving buildings and show you some of the structures that are still standing.

You can climb up the building on the left in that last photo (“Tall people, watch your head!”) and see some of the unloading facilities for the ore and iron pellets. The guy with the beard is our tour guide, who kept us there for far longer than the actual tour was supposed to last but it was utterly fascinating so we didn’t complain a bit.

You bob and weave through the buildings, and if you enjoy urban industrial aesthetics, as I do, it is a great place to visit.

It’s hard to wrap your head around just how big it is if you’re just looking at the photographs. The scale of the machinery in steel manufacturing is truly mind boggling.

They also showed us a lot of the art that’s there, everything from graffiti art (which is now fairly regulated in an orderly sort of way, though they do preserve some of the older stuff from when the place was abandoned) to sculptures. The reclining rabbit was one of my favorites, in part because it had a certain attitude that I liked.

The big attraction is the deer head, which apparently predates the takeover of the place by organized groups. It was built by people who never really expected it to be seen by anyone else, and there is a certain purity to that. Like most things at Carrie, it’s huge.

We left Carrie deeply impressed and in need of sustenance. Dinner was waiting at home, but we stopped at a local libation shop to purchase snacks and reacquaint ourselves with the comedy that is the Pennsylvania Liquor Control code (“Those over there you can buy and take out, but those over here you have to drink here”). It all worked out in the end, and we spent another lovely evening on the back porch with Mike and Krista, happily immersed in conversation.

The next day we drove to Albany to meet Ewan and Jenny.

Ewan has been a commenter here on the blog for a long time now, and we’ve been Facebook friends for a while as well, but we’d never actually met in person. But he invited us to visit and we thought that would be a lovely idea, and indeed it was!

Lucy, you’re next.

We left Pittsburgh early and stopped for breakfast at an Eat & Park, which is a Pittsburgh institution although why it isn’t “Park & Eat” I don’t know. But they make very good pies, and that has to count for something. Kim managed to sit in on a phone meeting while we were in the mountains of northeastern Pennsylvania – a triumph of communications technology in many ways – and we got to Ewan’s house in the late afternoon. There was conversation! There were beverages! There was a tasty dinner with Ewan, Jenny, and their youngest son Keiran*, and it was very nice to meet them all in person after so long.

*[fixed!]

 

The next day we headed out to the Indian Ladder Trail at Thacher Park, which is astonishingly lovely. It’s an escarpment that overlooks a broad valley, and you climb down the stairs to a lower level – not all the way down – and walk along a trail for a while, marveling as you go.

You pass layers of folded rock, though not – on this trip – any of the efts who inhabit the place.

The highlight for me was the waterfalls, which apparently come and go with the seasons so our timing was good. There are several of them and they cascade down from above while you’re on the trail. You can go behind them or just hang out in the spray.

After a quick stop at a local coffeeshop we headed into Albany proper to see the place. It’s a nice city from what we could tell, though the State Capitol was feverishly busy with last minute budget wrangling, lobbying, and an entire Habitat For Humanity hammering festival out in front so parking was at a premium. On the plus side the place was festooned with food trucks, which is always a good sign in my book.

Our goal was to take the tour of the Capitol building, which meant going through the security line that is inevitable in such buildings these days and – in my case – going through it again because I forgot to leave my Swiss Army knife in the car and the guard said that rather than him confiscating it I should just go outside and put it somewhere inconspicuous and it would probably be there when I got back and you know? It was.

It's a fascinating building and we got to see a fair amount of it, including the House and Senate chambers which were in recess over the lunch hour while we were there. Opulent does not even begin to describe them, and the tour guide did a good job of explaining it all. I really enjoyed one particular room full of very odd paintings – note the last photo below – but there is no accounting for my taste.

From there we went out onto a vast concrete plaza across the street, one that had the look of either a 1960s architectural drawing brought to life or a near-future dystopian spaceport. Possibly both. They are not mutually exclusive, after all. But it was interesting in a mid-century sort of way, particularly the Egg, which is the roundish building below and which now serves as a theater. Maybe it always did, but I confess that by the time we got in I was a bit distracted.

This is where I lost my battle with a curb.

We were heading toward the Egg, and for some reason – probably because I kept stopping to take photos – I was a few paces behind Ewan and Kim. There was a raised strip about a meter wide that ran across my path and I saw the far curb but didn’t see the near one and then there was kicking and stumbling and no small amount of flailing but fortunately I landed on my hands and didn’t faceplant. A passing nurse (really! she was!) checked me out and said that if my wrist didn’t get better then it probably wasn’t just sprained like I thought and I should get it looked at.

Can’t take me anywhere.

But it didn’t hurt all that much, so we continued on with our day. We went to get lunch from the food trucks, and then back across the plaza to the New York State Museum which had some great displays. There’s an entire exhibit on 9/11, as you would expect, and it is very well done and I took no photographs of it because as a former firefighter there are some things that are sacred.

We also went to see the campus where Ewan works and he showed us around – it’s a very nice place full of breezeways and colonnades and I enjoyed seeing it, but I didn’t take any pictures of that either because by this point it was starting to dawn on me that yeah, probably not just sprained and I should go to the urgent care about it. Grumble grumble grumble silly me grumble grumble.

Sigh.

Fortunately as we were heading off to do this Jenny called and pointed out that there was in fact a specifically Orthopedic urgent care with an x-ray and, it turned out, we were driving right past it at that very moment! So in we went, and less than an hour later, out I came with a bright purple cast – my very first one.

Never too late for new experiences, kids!

We went back home, had a marvelous dinner and good conversation, and eventually drifted up to our beds.

The next day we went to New York City and thereabouts, but that will be another post.