How do you get to Sandusky, Ohio without taking a car or a plane? First we walked to the bottom of our street to catch the bus to Alewife...
...where we took the red line subway to South Station...
...to meet the Lake Shore Limited Amtrak train
It was a pleasant 5 hour ride to Albany where we met Erin and Heather
Our sleeper accommodations allowed us a meal in the dining car
The kids slept well but not so for Mom and Dad. Something about the motion of the train and the bunk's orientation perpendicular to the tracks gave me a sleep-resistant feeling of hurtling through space.
At 5:20 AM we arrived in Sandusky, where Jon, ever the trooper, picked us up from the dark, desolate station
After coffee and breakfast at Denny's we were ready for Cedar Point. It was amazing, and not just for the coasters. Tessie loved Cedar Downs, a racing carousel
Many of the coasters were record breakers when they were built, like Millennium Force, 300 feet high and top-speed 93 mph.
Not sure what a dive coaster is, but Valravn is a crazy ride
This coaster is more my speed
Tessie was 47 and 7/8 inches, which kept her off most of the coasters, that is until some socks ended up in her heels and pushed her up to 48 inches. She rode the Corkscrew for her first real roller coaster.
It was great to spend a day with Jon and Heather and their family
The next day we rode the boat out to Put-in-Bay in Lake Erie
It was a cute little island with many golf carts. Erin was disappointed that Mom's Uber didn't work as a cart-share app.
The attraction out here is Perry's Victory and International Peace Memorial. The battle was during the War of 1812 where Rhode Island's most famous son Oliver Hazard Perry beat the mighty British navy.
But the place celebrates more than just the battle,
it celebrates the longest undefended border in the world and the continuous peace between the US, the UK, and Canada. The Ehmann family are a product of this happy arrangement.
For several years we have thought about visiting Pittsburgh, and it worked out that Claire brought Grampa Ed up from DC and we flew in to meet them. We met on the riverboat Explorer, run by the Rivers of Steel NHA. We saw much steel in the many bridges as we cruised up and down the Allegheny, Monongahela, and Ohio rivers alongside the revitalized city.
The river breeze cut through the heat of the day
Although not occupied by the H.J. Heinz company anymore, the buildings still stand where Grampa worked his first job out of graduate school in food science
The senator John Heinz History Center had something for everyone, like a display of Heinz products over the years. There were way more than 57 varieties, like fig pudding from the 1910s and
submarine food
This 1936 stainless steel Ford sedan reminds me of the cubic foot of copper in the Edison museum. An industry was so grateful for the use of its metal that it made something ludicrous out of it.
Anyone recognize this play?
It's Franco Harris's Immaculate Reception from the 1970s Steel Curtain days
My dad always said that a lot of NFL quarterbacks came from Pittsburgh and here's the map to prove it.
Is it a sport? A classic topic for barroom debate. My college friends concluded that to be a sport, it has to make you sweat and people have to want to pay to watch it. Sorry marbles, fox hunting, and steamboat racing, you're not sports.
Among the inventors and inventions from Pittsburgh, George Westinghouse does not get enough credit. After his air brake invention enabled the expansion of safe railway travel, he pursued electricity and eventually won the battle with Edison over AC vs DC current. This is the electric chair that Edison's camp created to smear the reputation of AC and Westinghouse.
Aah coal, in 1920 was there anything we couldn't make from your bounty? Reason number 10,617 I'm so happy not to live back then: we no longer light our houses with illuminating gas, the top left branch on the tree. In fact every bedroom in my house has a detector to protect me from this insidious poison, aka carbon monoxide.
The museum went on and on: the jeep, the Big Mac, the roller coaster: invented in Pittsburgh
Mr. Rogers TV show: from WQED in Pittsburgh
We ran out of steam before we got to the plane and billboard displays. It's always wise to leave something exciting to come back to see.
Pittsburgh even has a Munchen-sanctioned Hofbrauhaus that had the best wurst and metric-sized beer steins. The half-liter was the largest mug that I drank in July, until we visited the home of the Brewers.
I have no memories of it, but Wallingford Dr is where I spent the first 26 months of my life.
The house still stands and Claire was fascinated with thoughts of what our lives would have been like if we had stayed in Pittsburgh. Me, there's no question I would have been an NFL quarterback.
The Allegheny Portage Railroad NHS requires some explaining. Back in the 1830s canal boat era, western Pennsylvanians wanted an east-west canal system to compete with New York and Maryland, but the Allegheny mountains were in the way. At the time steam engines couldn't pull rail cars all the way up the mountain. The solution was to build a system of 12 separate inclined rails each linked to a steam engine that pulled the canal boats up with assistance from the weight of boats going down on the parallel track. Ropes held everything together, and before cables were invented, runaway train disasters were common.
But the transportation system worked, enough to ship 23 million pounds of bacon in 1843. That's 63,000 pounds, or 2-3 packet boats of bacon per day going up and down the railway.
We learned about natural textile dyes. In order there's onion skin for light pink, madder root for orange and red, indigo for blue and cochineal for purple. The royal purple of cochineal is so rare because the dye comes from the extracted shells of a scale insect that lives on prickly pear cacti.
The vintage tavern on the canal had all the fixings, like meat, potatoes, spilled wine,
and parlor games
Right next to the park was one of the busiest freight lines in the US and we stopped for lunch with other railfans to watch a freight train go by
The Johnstown Flood occurred in 1889 when a poorly maintained dam owned by a wealthy club failed and released a lake that hammered the town of Johnstown
What made the flood so horrific was that as it barreled 14 miles towards Johnstown it picked up tons of debris from trees, buildings, railyards, a barbed wire factory (!), and fuel tanks. A stone bridge at the end of Johnstown trapped all the people and stuff, which then caught fire as night was falling. The life-size diorama recounted people's stories of the ordeal. Humanitarian aid for the flood victims came from all over the world and the relief effort was led by Clara Barton's newly formed American Red Cross.
We could hear screaming sounds coming from the site's movie and exiting parents warned us that the video was not kid-friendly, so it was photo time
The new members of the stuffed animal family are Timber Chuck, Sassafras, and Tigerlily
The Flight 93 Memorial was powerful, well done, and more crowded than any site we've been to in the Northeast. In the Jr booklet the kids learned some of the stories of the passengers (quite a few were Hawaiian) and what memorials stand for. The recordings from the passengers were too much for any of us to take.
The older contingent edified themselves with a visit to Fallingwater
while the young'ns played at the Seven Springs Resort
It was everyone's first ski-lift ride to the top of the mountain
to the alpine slide
where the sleds would fly down the concrete track
We bounced
and enjoyed local cuisine
At Claire's everyone was into drawing
and we caught the Chesapeake Beach fireworks
enjoyed crepes
After the latest chicken massacre, Katy's new setup requires chaperoning all times when they're out of the coop
We swam in the Chesapeake Bay
We released this groundhog trapped in a crab trap and were mildly disappointed when he didn't grant us three wishes
Friends Jon and Heather visited from Indiana and Jerry provided the pyrotechnics
...where we took the red line subway to South Station...
...to meet the Lake Shore Limited Amtrak train
It was a pleasant 5 hour ride to Albany where we met Erin and Heather
Our sleeper accommodations allowed us a meal in the dining car
The kids slept well but not so for Mom and Dad. Something about the motion of the train and the bunk's orientation perpendicular to the tracks gave me a sleep-resistant feeling of hurtling through space.
At 5:20 AM we arrived in Sandusky, where Jon, ever the trooper, picked us up from the dark, desolate station
After coffee and breakfast at Denny's we were ready for Cedar Point. It was amazing, and not just for the coasters. Tessie loved Cedar Downs, a racing carousel
Many of the coasters were record breakers when they were built, like Millennium Force, 300 feet high and top-speed 93 mph.
Not sure what a dive coaster is, but Valravn is a crazy ride
The next day we rode the boat out to Put-in-Bay in Lake Erie
It was a cute little island with many golf carts. Erin was disappointed that Mom's Uber didn't work as a cart-share app.
But the place celebrates more than just the battle,
We did not write that
That's better
