resmarie

I have had many songs from Simon & Garfunkel in my head this holiday, like America (never thought I would go to Pittsburgh) and So long, Frank Lloyd Wright. Now it is time for Homeward Bound.

Arvid and I drove to Dulles, Washington, yesterday and will now get ready, leave the car (I will miss the wonderful KIA Sedona) and hopefully have a nice time looking at people and things at the airport and have a good flight home.

We have had a wonderful holiday in State College and Central Square. Thank you, Katy, Brad, Amanda, Ingrid, Paddy, Burton and Emy for having us. We hope to see you all again soon.

Pennsylvania was a blank for me when we went. We have had great weather with warm, sunny days (short trousers and a t-shirt and almost no need for anything else) and cool nights. It’s the best climate I have ever visited.

The nature in Pennsylvania is magnificent. It would be wonderful to see all these forests explode into read, yellow and orange during the autumn but that will have to wait for another time.

It is easy to drive here and to find the way, there is always a sign telling you the road number and the direction. We have done a lot of driving and it would be difficult to be here without a car. We drove 2.269 miles in 3 weeks, that is about 360 Swedish miles, lucky the gas is about half the price as in Sweden.

However, we will not miss the American food at all. It is horrible and presented in the most depressing way. It is all plastics and added flavours. Natural food made from basic ingredients is hard to find and very expensive.

Clothes are cheap though, especially if you travel at this time of year when there is a sale. Hope they will not be too fuzzy about weight at the airport.

It has been a great pleasure travelling with Arvid and we both look forward to meeting George, the rest of the family and friends in Sweden.

Thanks for reading this blog. There will be a lot of travelling this autumn, Lissabon and Southeast Asia is on the list so far.

We looked hopefully for Indian breakfast instead of the premade quite boring American one, but unfortunately we didn’t get to taste any of the homemade food put on the owner’s table. We got to sit outside which somewhat compensated us.

At 10.00 we were at the Christmas Shop very close to the hotel, http://www.thechristmasshop-chalkhill.com/History.html. The history of the house is very interesting but unless you are very interested in Christmas stuff the shop is nothing special. I got to buy my first Christmas present, though….

We drove through Ohiopyle State Park and were at Fallingwater by 10.30. A pre-booked tour was on at 11.00, http://www.fallingwater.org/. Fallingwater is the most famous private  house made by American architect Frank Lloyd Wright. The most famous is of course the Guggenheim Museum in New York.

I must say I loved everything about it. The house is amazing. The tour was very well performed. The shop is great (but not cheap). The food is the best food I have had here so far (ordinary salad with real cutlery, no take away). Huge parking space. Wonderful scenery. Quiet. And again, the house is amazing.

First place I bought a book this holiday. Ingrid and I discussed why it is not a world heritage place?

Hope you’ll enjoy the pictures. If you have a chance, go there.

All the pictures with me in them are taken by Ingrid. Thank you, Ingrid, for a wonderful trip and a lot of new impressions.

Time for a real treat, IKEA in Pittsburgh! IKEA is never so good at home in Sweden as it is abroad. It is great to see the Swedish flag outside the shop and the pictures of idyllic places in Sweden, preferably Smögen and the center of Stockholm. You can eat meatballs with lingonberry and know more about the products than those employed in the shop. We have grown up with assembling IKEA furniture, there’s nothing we can’t do.

We immediately stated that this must be an old IKEA store, it is not built as the new ones with parking space under the shop. We soon found that it was not very clean… and a few products were broken. The meatballs tasted nice but had a kind of chewy consistence and we missed the little Swedish flag on a toothpick that IKEA Chengdu usually has, according to Ingrid who has a genuine knowledge of one of her favorite shops in Chengdu, I have only been there once with her, many years ago.

Of course we managed to buy a lot of things in spite of our criticism. In fact, Ingrid is assembling a book shelf on the floor in this very minute. She even has a rubber hammer to put the different parts together.

http://www.ikea.com/us/en/store/pittsburgh

Anyway, we spent a lot of time at IKEA and were in a bit of a rush getting out. IKEA is situated in a gigantic shopping mall and we found only dead ends driving about. I’m seldom lost but this time I even ended up driving in the wrong direction when we finally reached the right road.

Ingrid called the Kentuck Knob and postponed our visit with an hour.  Ingrid had booked tickets before and we were looking forward to our visit at one of Frank Lloyd Wright’s houses, http://kentuckknob.com/. The house was beautiful but rather small and a bit dark, the view over the hills amazing. Very good shop and a nice guided tour.

We drove through Ohiopyle State Park http://www.dcnr.state.pa.us/stateparks/findapark/ohiopyle/ and passed the Youghiogheny [yawki-gay-nee] River, neither easy to pronounce. The area is beautiful and you can do a lot of outdoor activities like whitewater rafting etc. It must be even more beautiful in the autumn when all the leaves turn into autumn colours.

After a short stop at our hotel in Chalkville, owned by Indians (from India) and with a nice view, we drove down to Uniontown to get something to eat. Almost a ghost town, we were amazed and drove the streets up and down to see the empty buildings from another time when the town was rich. Now nothing seemed to be in action. The theatre building was very elaborate and well- made from the art noveau period..

We decided to go somewhere fancier and went to http://summitinnresort.com/ and had decent food looking at the sunset.

Early in the morning Ingrid and I left for Pittsburgh, about a 3 hrs drive. We found a parking lot right outside of the Andy Warhol Museum, http://www.warhol.org/.

Andy Warhol had the perfect feeling for what was going on and made things just enough shocking to get publicity, he was a great marketer. The museum had a lot of information about him and his development and I liked him and his work much more when I left than when I came.

We took a walk through a bit strange neighborhood to the other museum we wanted to see, the Mattress Factory, http://www.mattress.org/. After some Mexican food we had the energy for the three houses filled with installations and modern art.

Pittsburgh seems to be a nice town and the Mexican war streets held lots of beautiful but old and sometimes dilapidated houses. Murals and a garden tries to improve the neighbourhood and, it seems, with some luck. We also passed RandyLand but didn’t have the time to stay and make a Facebook-movie on how we would print “Välkommen” in Swedish on his door, http://randy.land/. Randy Gilson was fully occupied with making a movie about the Hungarian “welcome” and we quietly went out the gate.

We tried to get down where the two rivers meet in Pittsburgh but there was a One Direction concert in the evening and I think the whole world was trying to park downtown Pittsburgh. We did one round and then gave up and went to our pre-booked hotel by the airport.

Due to the early morning, the long drive, the many things we saw and the driving in an unknown city I passed out and it became a very early night.