Day 27 (9.28.07) - Pittsburgh to Erie, PA

Starting Mileage: 114201
Ending Mileage: 114450
Weather: Overcast & Rainy at times, with some sun breaks

Geography Lesson: Fallingwater is about an hours drive south of Pittsburgh, the city of Erie is on Lake Erie, about two hours drive north of Pittsburgh. Once again, we are going in circles... (but it's worth it?)

I have always been something of a closet Frank Lloyd Wright fan, not as rabid as many fans of his architecture - but I'm impressed with buildings that he designed. Once I realized that one of his most famous designs, the Fallingwater house, was just an hours drive from Pittsburgh, of course I had to visit it. Mom wasn't as thrilled with this as I was - we are running a bit behind schedule and this was also in the wrong direction, but I have the keys to the RV, so off we go

(Actually, on a trip like this it is unlikely that two different people will always agree on everything they want to see. We have an informal agreement that when we stop someplace that only one of use wants to see, it's OK for the other to wait in the RV if they don't want to take the tour. Mom chose to do this at Fallingwater, partly because there is a lot of walking and steps on the tour and partly because she just didn't care to see it that much.)

No photography is allowed during the tour (we'd probably never get done with the tour), so today's blog will be quite short. Here are a couple of my shots from the exterior (yes, I bought a book with pictures of the interior, and a postcard, and a DVD, and the gift shops are making a lot of money off of me):

Here is a lot more information about the house (if you've never heard of it before):

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fallingwater

The area the Fallingwater house is in is called "Laurel Heights". One interesting thing I noticed was houses built of both Stone and Brick. I don't think I've seen these materials combined like this elsewhere:

The rest of the day I drove pretty hard to make up the time - straight from Fallingwater all the way up to Erie. Western Pennsylvania is heavily wooded an has a lot of low, but fairly steep hills. There are farms, I suspect the pioneers cleared land for farming as it looks like the natural terrain is wooded. There is also one very cool thing about rain - if you don't have any rain, you don't get any rainbows!

ps - you probably noticed a change starting with Day 26's blog - pictures. I thought now that I'm keeping the writing more caught up, maybe I'd start keeping the current day's pictures caught up also - then try to go back get the rest caught up later. However, it's almost 2 AM and I just finished these two, so we'll see....