Three Days in the Land of Three Rivers

The Point State Park Fountain, located at the confluence of rivers that gave
Pittsburgh's former Three Rivers Stadium its name. Heinz Field, current home of
NFL's Pittsburgh Steelers, lies across the Allegheny River in the background

Pittsburgh, like many Midwest cities, finds itself in the long-term quest of reinventing itself

A city traditionally known for its bustling steel industry and a blue-collar reputation, Pittsburgh has used a multi-pronged effort in the fields of education, industry and government to diversify its job mix and economic base, trying to stem the tide of population loss that has turned the once tenth largest city by population in the country in 1940 to 64th in 2019.

Tourism is also a vital part of boosting the city's fortunes. There was a day where I wouldn't have even considered traveling for pleasure to a place like Pittsburgh, but that just shows how times change and how the spirit to explore is indeed a good one. And thus, our most recent road trip adventures took us into the Keystone State of Pennsylvania, with our first days spent in the Steel City.

Crafty Types, Church Brews and Zoo Lights: Return Travels to Cincy (Pt. 2)

Signs of Christmas were everywhere in Cincinnati, including the Cincinnati Zoo

This second of three blog posts naturally contains one of our prize package receipts from the Cincinnati Convention and Visitors Bureau, and it was perhaps the most anticipated one as will be explained later in this post. As noted in our last blog post, we were hardly going to stick strictly to  our prize winnings, so we added in one of the more unique brewery settings in Ohio for a nice combination of Christmas shopping as well as one of the first breweries in Buckeye State focusing on sour beers.

The blog/website Ohio Explored mission is a a basic one: to awaken people to the beauty of Ohio. One of their most popular methods of achieving that resides in their Ohio Maker Mart, which feature local artisans of food, arts and crafts creations. Due to a last minute from one of my blogger colleagues, we figured out the winter edition would be in Cincinnati that very weekend, at a location that worked out perfectly with our catching up with the area's brewing scene.

Motor City Touring: The Detroit Zoo

Our trip into Detroit to visit friends not only involved good food but also time spent with their precocious young daughters. With that in mind, we decided that a trip to the zoo would be a perfect destination for this short weekend visit.

Having been to a couple fine zoos relatively recently in the Columbus Zoo and the Smithsonian's National Zoo in Washington DC, we were tempering our expectations a bit. However, the Detroit Zoo, established in 1928 and currently run by the Detroit Zoological Society. was the very first zoo in the nation to display animals in cage-less exhibits, and ended up packing quite a punch in terms of the animals and exhibits in what seemed to an easily navigable layout.