Day 8 - On to Pittsburgh

We had a two and a half hour drive today into Pennsylvania from Ohio for an evening game at PNC Park. The cool thing about this park is that it is small, with only 39,000 seats, and most fans walk over a bridge to the game which gets shut down to vehicle traffic on game days. We did a couple touristy things in the afternoon before going to the game. 

The first was a tram-like ride to the top of a large hill, which provided a great view of Pittsburgh. It is a neat city, with three rivers joining right downtown. From our viewpoint, we could count at least 18 bridges going every direction. The downtown core is fairly small, and we found a great place for lunch where we had sandwiches that were huge, partially because the French fries are grilled right into the sandwich. Amazingly it works!

We also toured the Senator John Heinz History Center, which was a fairly decent museum focusing on Pennsylvania history and a lot of Penn sports. We were able to park downtown for $5 all day (try to do that in Vancouver) and walked to the park across the bridge. A beautiful park with real baseball fans that are almost all dressed in Pirate black and yellow, they looked like 39000 killer bees. The home team won 5-1, and everyone went home happy. 

One of the interesting things about the park is they sell a bucket of delicious chicken wings for $33. No, we didn’t try them; we saw a lot of people who did. And wouldn’t you know it, there were post-game fireworks again tonight. They were shot off from the river behind the stadium, which was cool, and they were good, but nowhere near as good as last night. We have a busy stretch over the next 24 hours. After the game tonight we are driving a couple hours to Columbus, Ohio, where we will have a quick sleep before getting up and driving the last hour and a half to Cincinnati where we will watch the Reds in an afternoon game. A cool thing about our drive tonight? For about 10 miles we will even pass through West Virginia before returning to Ohio. What an education these boys are getting!