Day 3: Pittsburgh

Day 3: Pittsburgh

QOTD: The wheels on the bus go round and round, round and round

Weather: Very clear, sunny and right about 50 all day

Pics:  FitCtr, gluten free zone, bus, Pizza Hut, Mattress Factory

Book Review: The Unknowns, Gabriel Roth (novel): A computer geek sells for big dollars and falls in love and overanalyzes the romance to the point of killing it. Fast paced given that there’s very little action. Mildly recommended.

Dept of clarification: Took cabs to-from Legume. Outbound, cabbie took Forbes Avenue and bragged about how it can be slower and steadier, 15-20 minutes, $11. Inbound to hotel, cabbie took mini-highway, 7 minutes and $10.

Time changes; THB finds the fitness center and apparently it is so obscure (off the lobby, and all by itself up a narrow set of stairs o the 2^nd floor) that the only other person he sees is DB! Breakfast buffet is seemingly strangely laid out (e.g., fresh bread is nowhere near the toaster) and there is a “gluten free” section about 10 feet from anything else…do glutens fly through the air? Is there a safe distance? Can with-gluten and gluten-free people share a table? A plate? THB has “Greek” yogurt with extra container built in for honey, toast, and a small café au lait.

The Oakland Museum of CA group meets in the lobby for an 8:45am departure. We’re all there in the gigantic lobby of this old and redone hotel. Lots of mingling and greetings. No bus. THB suspects it is because there is a 10 mile race starting at 10am near the hotel and streets are closed off. How does THB know this? Because while he was on the elliptical and channel surfing, he caught the 6:30am local news for 40 seconds and that was what they were discussing.

Sure enough, the bus driver finally links up with one of our tour leaders (having only her home phone and not cell) and he is stuck in “traffic”….he’s just stuck, there’s no real traffic, nobody else has wandered downtown on a Sunday morning. Time goes by, and after about a half hour, the group walks 5 blocks to the bus.

On the bus with us is a docent for our first stop, Kentuck Knob, a Frank Lloyd Wright house and sculpture garden not far from Falling Waters, a very famous FLW house. THB and DB were here a few years ago, in between visiting ballparks (there are 30 of those now open, THB has seen 47 in total). THB is not sure how many FLW buildings he has visited; it is also a substantial number.

THB mentions the docent for a specific reason: it appears we are not taking the same route to Kentuck Knob and Falling Waters that TBH faintly remembers oh these many years later. At one point, about an hour into what is supposed to be a 1.5 hour trip,  the bus is going up a hill at 4 mph (speed limit is 40), turns the corner, and smoke starts pouring out the engine. Pull over, evacuate, and wait for reinforcements. And, since the bus is turned off, the toilet in the back of the bus is no longer functioning. The silver-lining detail: there was no bottled water on the bus (there’s always water on the bus on OMCA trips), so there isn’t as much of a need for the toilet as usual.

Well over an hour later, reinforcements arrive: a spare bus and a bus repairman.  The wheels on the (new) bus starting turning again. We are significantly behind schedule, so lunch at Falling Waters is scrapped, then a plan to eat to Subway is scrapped (they are too busy to handle our pre-order), and we end up at Pizza Hut (somewhere THB has never eaten): salad, 1.5 slices of pizza, Sierra Mist. This is also a first for OMCA, there has not been a bus breakdown before on one of their trips

Kentuck Knob has gone bye-bye (we pass that turnoff after well over 2+hrs of driving time, let alone real time); the docent and the driver cannot agree on the best route; we’re taking mostly freeways now (definitely not what THB remembers oh those many years ago) . Around 2:30, some 4 hours late for our first stop, we arrive at Falling Waters, our new first stop.

THB and DB did not get a tour of the inside last time, there were no more slots open when we did our drive-by. It is a great tour, and our docent is terrific. FLW did this one right, top to bottom, site specific, and even gave in a little to the owners’ wishes (Kaufmann family, owners of the Kaufmann department stores, now gone to be part of some larger chain).

Back on the bus and on the road back to the hotel, where we arrive in less than 1.5 hours. Is it possible? It is a trend for THB: it takes a lot longer to get somewhere than to come back from somewhere. A brief stop at the hotel; so brief there is only time for one of our tour leaders to jump off and  pick up gifts for our hosts at the next stop, the Mattress Factory, and a few brave souls rushing to use the hotel restrooms (there’s still no bottled water on the bus; THB has stocked up with trail mix from the café at Falling Waters just in case we don’t make it back to Pitt-town).

Mattress Factory is a contemporary art museum made up of 3 buildings in a run-down part of town about 15 minutes from the hotel, across the river (just about everything is across the river in Pittsburgh, there’s a sound reason for calling the former stadium Three Rivers, though that is an old fashioned non-branded name that isn’t applicable anymore).

There are several major installations by artists that have been working for years in cooperation with the co-directors (a “couple” that live together and are life partners yet seem pretty clearly to not be share-the-bed partners); a show of six Detroit artists (or teams of artists), one of which is by Scott Hocking, the artist that led our OMCA tour around Detroit a few years ago.

It’s exciting to see new work mixed in with established artists (e.g., Yayoi Kusama of pumpkin-on-Naoshima-fame and James Turrell;  both have permanent exhibitions), and dinner in the directors’ loft atop one of the buildings is exhilarating: they have 3500 sq feet full of a variety of collections (dolls, clocks, TV’s, mid-century furniture, and on, and on…). Dinner is catered by the folks that run the café for the museum: excellent appetizers (shrimp wrapped in prosciutto, pork quesadillas, butternut squash patties), and buffet dinner of salmon, flavored rice, kale and citrus salad (great!), veggies, and lemon tart (THB gets a double portion) and plenty of wine.

We’re back to the hotel after 10, about an hour late though nobody is complaining, the food and wine and art have been very restorative.