After we went to the Flight 93 Memorial, Bill and I drove to an animal park that houses animals that were abused, or that were kept as pets by people who didn’t know better. It was nice to see that people were trying to better these animals lives, but sad also because it’s all privately funded and they can barely keep up the costs to feed the animals let alone properly house them. They had a good variety of just about everything, lions, and tigers, and bears…oh, my. Also monkeys, wolves, farm animals, camels, llamas, etc,etc. As well as something that I can only explain as a pig-cow, it had to have been a mistake of nature. We didn’t take any pictures as they all would have shown the cage bars, and that’s just sad in my opinion.
The following day (Monday August 1st) was spent catching up and doing laundry, and more laundry, and more laundry. I got to experience a real Laundromat (not an RV park Laundromat which are usually much nicer than public ones), and I’m not terribly excited to go back, although we are getting to the point that we’re going to have to. They still let people smoke in the Laundromat’s here, which just makes my head want to explode, not just from the smell, but from the thought of it, here I am trying to get my clothes clean and smelling nice like fabric softener, and there’s some guy in the corner chain-smoking waiting for his clothes to finish. I don’t get it.
After laundry we went to visit with Bill’s family that was really nice. I finally got to meet the rest of his family, it’s about time. We had a really nice visit that included dinner, we ordered pizza from a local place here…it was FABULOUS!! When Bill’s mom asked me what we usually liked I told her to order anything, so long as there was no fruit on the pizza, because fruit doesn’t belong on pizza in my opinion. Both his mom and grandmother stopped and looked at me like I was from another planet. (they thought I was kidding about people actually putting fruit on pizza) Bill’s mom finally said, “what are you talking about? Fruit on pizza? Who’s heard of such a thing?” and left to order. This left me with his grandmother to explain that on the West Coast they have such a thing as a Hawaiian pizza with Canadian and pineapple. When I told this to Bill’s mom, she got the funniest look of revulsion and ‘that’s just not right’ on her face, that I had to chuckle at…my thoughts exactly…fruit doesn’t belong on pizza.
The next day (August 2nd) we attempted to go to the opening day of Steeler training camp, what a mistake. The place was a zoo and they had the field blocked off so that you could only watch practice from a hilltop that you’d be lucky to see the players at all without binoculars. So, since the crowd was so thick and it was so hot, we left and went to Fort Ligonier instead (http://www.fortligonier.org/). Fort Ligonier is a cool place. They’ve rebuilt the fort the way it was originally based on archeological findings and documents from the period. They have it set up so that you can walk through all the buildings and in the buildings they have set up inside the way they think it would have been at the time with information about how and why they did things the way they did. It was really a lot of fun and very informative. As an aside: There are plaques all over Pennsylvania that have historic information on them i.e.: at this site in whatever year, something historic happened. It’s incredible to be driving down any street and see them, everywhere.
After Fort Ligonier we drove to the Latrobe Brewing Company, home of Rolling Rock Beer, and checked out their company store. We didn’t do the tour, but we may sometime before leaving, we’ll have to wait and see. They have a hallway that’s done up like a museum and not only do they have Rolling Rock stuff, but also things that are specific to Latrobe, like the fact that it is home to the first Banana Split, Fred Rogers (aka: Mr. Rogers), Arnold Palmer, and others, it was pretty fun to read all the ‘fun facts’ about Latrobe, PA.
All in all we’ve been having some pretty full days. My next post will be about our trip to Canton, OH to the National Football Hall of Fame.
Hugs~
;-)K
