We finally made it to Pittsburgh!

The consensus was to leave Saturday morning at around 9 or 10...

We left the house around 10:15 am... but our first stop was just 5 minutes away, as we both needed something in our bellies before the Long 2 hour drive (JK). We pulled into the local Panera Bread for some fine coffee and rich and filling pastries. Sarah ended up getting the Cream Cheese and I got the Cherry and Cream Cheese filled Pastry, we also got the Hazelnut Coffee (What would we do without Panera…). After the quick stop for breakfast to go, off we went...

But just as we were about to get onto I-79, I realized that I had forgotten to grab my Lens Pen to clean the dust and would-be finger prints off of my Canon Powershot A610 (It also coats the lens with a special cleaning compound, very nice addition to any camera set). I definitely didn't want to have every picture from our trip to Pittsburgh to be covered in spots (What to do?!). We were a block away from Van Tuil Photography (I still had a twenty dollar gift certificate from them, sweet!), so we decided just to stop there and pick up a few things...

...After talking to Dan the Van inside and almost walking out with a brand new $3,200 Canon 5D (Dan actually had one in the store. I saw, I touched, I shot, I drooled, I left)… …He almost let me take'r for a spin for the weekend, but I didn't want to let him down when I didn't buy it on my return (David, he wants you to call him collect)… …We ended up leaving with a nice new saddlebag from lowepro for my Canon EOS Elan IIe (Or for the future 5D) and a top of the line lens pen for the weekend. We finally left Erie around 11:30 (As you can see, we were going by Indian Time).

We had great weather all the way there, and it only took us a little over 2 hours to finally get their (Not too bad, we got there around 1:30). Julie was home and Chris worked till 5, so we had some time to walk around town and take in some of the sights. The Buildings downtown were just magnificent, I couldn't get enough... what a beautiful weekend for trip to Pitt!

After walking around a bit we went to Ikea for some more walking and grabbed some lunch "to boot" (Ikea did have some pretty good food in their cafeteria). We didn't stay very long and Sarah just grabbed a few decorations for the Christmas tree. We then headed over to the Robinson Mall to do some window-shopping. After that, we picked Chris up from work and headed back downtown to go up Duquesne Incline to get a great view of Downtown Pittsburgh from above (Pics, pics and more pics). Later that night we went to get some delicious Pittsburgh style sandwiches and since you can only get that at one place, we headed over to Primanti Brothers! It must have been good, because I stuffed myself way too much that night.

On Sunday I had planned on taking some pictures of my cousin Josh for his senior pictures (My cousin Josh lives in Pittsburgh with my Aunt Tish). We walked around downtown taking pictures of him whenever we came across a good backdrop. I will post some of those pics when I am done editing them as they are still in postproduction. We then headed for Heinz Field to see if we could get in to get a few pics of the Hall of Fame floor on the lower level, but of course it was closed for the day.

We started to get the hunger pains, so we decided to feed the belly again before it was too late (And no, I don't now what happens when it actually becomes too late). We walked over the historical Smithfield Street Bridge (1881) to get to Station Square, where we ate at a nice restaurant called Houlihan's. We wanted to go to the Ross Park Mall after that, but it ended up getting too late and we needed to rest up a bit (our legs were hurting) before heading back to Erie.

So! We finally got to go to Pittsburgh to visit Julie and Chris... and we couldn't have picked a better weekend to do so. We will be back again I'm sure, I still have some pictures I didn't take, I can get them the next time around.

Thanks Julie and Chris for letting us stay with you in Pittsburgh and next time we come, we will have to play poker.

I hope everyone else had a good weekend... and HAPPY HALLOWEEN!!!!