Pittsburgh, PA - Day 2

Bike Rodeo

Every year the local Pittsburgh area police department and EMT puts on a bike rodeo, and we just happened to come on the weekend it was happening, and so we brought the kids' bikes with us on the trip.

What a great idea, this rodeo.  They safety checked the bikes, and gave all the kids free helmets, adjusted correctly by the EMTs.  There was also a free raffle for a new bike (they gave away 4 bikes), and Elizabeth won!  ...  Elijah was VERY disappointed that he didn't win the cool green boys' bike.  In an act more Miciah-ish than Elijah-ish, he cried and sulked for about 15 minutes.  Then he was over it.

I thought the kids would get bored relatively quickly, but they rode around the parking lot obstacle course for over 2 hours!

By the end, Miciah was noticeably better at riding her bike (remember, she's only been riding without training wheels for a few weeks, which really only equals a few hours total riding time).  She was also noticeably sunburned.

Of course, what did Tank do most of the time?

He's an observer.  Though he enjoyed riding the course as well.  He just didn't have the 2-hour stamina like the older kids did.  (I took lots of pictures of him sucking his fingers, watching the other kids.  When he's older I'd like him to realize just how often he sucked those fingers.)

As we were driving back to Aliess' house, Elijah asked if we could come back to the Bike Rodeo next year.  It was that cool.

Downtown Pittsburgh and the Incline

My friend had told me that downtown Pittsburgh had been voted one of the prettiest skylines in the world.  I was skeptical.  I mean, I'm fond of Cincinnati's skyline.  Was Pittsburgh really that much better?  The answer is yes.

I wish I could have found a historic picture of Pittsburgh, when the steel factories were still downtown.  There were shots of downtown, pitch black, and the captions said, "Pittsburgh, 3:00 p.m." or "Noon."  Craziness.


Fun for me:  Pittsburgh still has 2 working inclines.  Cincinnati used to have a few inclines, but they've all been torn down.  I've always been sad that I couldn't see them in action, so I was thrilled to ride the Duschene Incline in Pittsburgh, instead.  This is a great fuzzy picture of the group of us riding the Incline:

I like to think of the shot as "modern" and "edgy."

Our family at the top:

It was, umm, bright.  Further proof of the brightness:

Pittsburgh also, by the way, has more bridges than any other city in the world.  FYI.

I took this picture of downtown Pittsburgh with the Incline in front:

There are about 50 different versions of this exact shot.  Seriously, if you google image Pittsburgh, this shot will be one of the first you'll find.

It's hard to demonstrate how steep the Incline really is.  That hill is STEEP.  There used to be stairs that went from the bottom to the top.  And don't be thinking stairs that went straight up the hill.  There was a historic picture, and those stairs wound all over the place.  Crazy.  I might have walked up those stairs once, but I wouldn't have done it twice.

Oh!  Another REALLY cool thing about downtown Pittsburgh is that where the tip is, 2 rivers come together to form the Ohio.  Did you know that the Ohio River starts in Pittsburgh?  Neither did I.  Here's the 2 rivers coming together:

The two colors stay separate for quite a while.  Not as dramatic as the Amazon's 2 rivers coming together:

But still, very cool.

So, thank you, downtown Pittsburgh, for being gorgeous.  No thank you, Pittsburgh-area roads, for being puke-ish and awful.  And thank you, Aliess, for letting us come visit.