For Canada Day long weekend, we took a road trip down to Pittsburgh. It might sound like a weird destination, but it’s a reasonable distance, there’s a factory outlet along the way, and it’s not Niagara Falls/Buffalo. We left around noon on Saturday for the ~5.5 hour trip. That time estimate wasn’t realistic because we quickly got stuck in traffic along the QEW. Of course, this was expected because it happens every long weekend on the way to Niagara. We made it to the Peace Bridge crossing in something like 2.5 hours and fortunately for us, there was no lineup — we were through in 10 minutes. I had checked the border wait times before heading out, and there were some incredulous delays like 3.5 hours in QC?! The rest of the drive was pretty uneventful and we made it to Grove City by 6:30PM.

Grove City is the location of a Prime Outlet town, it exists because of the factory outlet. Why drive 6 hours to a factory outlet in Pennsylvania? Because there’s no tax on clothes!
We shopped until the place closed down at 9PM and then drove the remaining hour down to Pittsburgh. It wasn’t a very scenic drive as there were no lights or much sign of civilization — that is until you went around a bend and suddenly Pittsburgh downtown was visible. That was pretty cool.

We stayed at the Renaissance Pittsburgh, one of the top 2 hotels in Pittsburgh. It shared its building with the Byham theatre and a Bally’s, so the lobby and facilities weren’t large but the rooms were surprisingly spacious! Because we arrived on Saturday night, after a Pirates game; we saw a lot of people wearing Pirates jerseys and checking out on Sunday. It seemed weird that one would check into a fancy hotel to go see a baseball game (would you check into the Royal York to watch a Jays game?). After putting down our stuff, we headed out for a walk. The Roberto Clemente bridge was right there so we walked across that and around PNC Park to take some pictures (you can see the Renaissance in the picture on Wikipedia as it’s just at the foot of the bridge).

The next morning, we wandered and drove around the city. Pittsburgh isn’t a huge tourist attraction so there wasn’t a lot of things worth seeing. We eventually made it to the University of Pittsburgh, whose claim to fame is the 42-story Cathedral of Learning. Think university campus, but instead of spreading it out over a couple of blocks, they built it Hong Kong style. It’s a good idea but the execution is poor because their elevators are horrible! This place was pretty neat in a couple of ways, first their Commons Room, where students can study is built like a cathedral with tall arched ceilings. Secondly, there are Nationality Rooms spread out over the first few floors which are classrooms in the style of various countries of the world. Afterwards we also drove around Carnegie Mellon University. It didn’t have as grand a presence (or maybe we didn’t drive in the right places).

After lunch, we went up to the top of Mt Washington at the Duquesne Incline. This is rated as the second most beautiful place in the USA as you can see the merging of two rivers into the Ohio river as well as Pittsburgh downtown. It was pretty neat, but the night view is the money shot, so we went to Station Square (kind of like Queen’s Quay) to kill some time and then back to the hotel for a bit.

We drove back to the base of the Duquesne Incline around dinner time and took the trolley up to Mt Washington. We had dinner during sunset at the Georgetowne Inn because it had a nice view. I think that was overrated because the view wasn’t that great and there’s too much reflection in the windows anyways. Pittsburgh used to be a huge steel town, which you can tell by all the steel bridges scattered everywhere. I was also reminded of this at dinner because all the plates, bowls and utensils were made of steel (as were the elevator doors in the Cathedral of Learning). Very weird. After dinner, we went back to the top of the incline and took some night pictures. This was tough because I didn’t have a tripod, but I was able to brace myself against the railing and took some decent shots at ISO400. I also played around with rear (or was it front?) curtain flash to get some people shots, but those didn’t turn out that great.

We went back to the hotel, woke up early the next day to head back to Grove City to finish up shopping and then headed back home. Even with all that shopping, we still weren’t able to reach the $400 exemption that we had due to our 48-hour stay. The drive back was pretty smooth, without traffic until we were around the construction at St Catherines on the QEW. The border crossing was again pretty quick, the guard didn’t even look at our passports.

Posted by Kevin in Blogs Tags: pittsburgh, travelling, usa