Pittsburgh, USA 5th May 2007

A break from our normal walking update as we travelled to the USA for a conference. After the non-arrival of our hire car - they had delivered it to the wrong village, we set off for Gatwick at 4am on Saturday morning. We cleared security and boarded the plane for the long flight. 7 hours 40 minutes on a plane is very boring! The plane was late landing and immigration at Newark took ages which meant we missed our connecting flight to Pittsburgh. US airways found us another flight and we finally got to our hotel at 8.30pm (ET).

First impressions of Pittsburgh is that it is a very clean city. 30 years ago it was very polluted with smoke from the steel mills but now it is a business city with a fantastic skyline. The city is sandwiched between 3 rivers and has over 400 bridges. The skyscrapers were very impressive especially the Pittsburgh Plate Glass building which was based on the Houses of Parliament.
I attended the conference for three days which included an evening trip on a Clipper boat to the Carnegie Science Museum.

We then had 2 days to explore on our own. Downtown Pittsburgh is mainly a business district and we discovered that there were very few shops except for places for the workers to get their lunches, we did spend some time exploring Macy's department store though.

On Thursday we used the Duquesne incline to travel up to Mount Washington for a stroll. This is a very nice housing district. while we were up the top there was a fly past by Marine 1 carrying President Bush to a graduation ceremony in Pittsburgh.

We also went on a Duckie Tour - a WWII amphibious boat which gives tours through Downtown Pittsburgh and then down the Monagahele River. It was an amusing commentary especially when they found out we were from England and that it had now become an International tour with Duty Free to be sold on the river!

On our last day we took a walk over to the North Shore and walked along the river bank to view the memorials to the Korean and Vietnam wars.

The Vietnam memorial is actually a Lotus flower, symbol of Peace and not a pineapple as we thought as it is situated outside the Del Monte building! We finished off with a walk to the Strip where we had an ice-cream sundae in an authentic 1930's ice-cream parlour.

We left Pittsburgh at 12pm ET, to catch our flight to Newark at 4pm. However, this was delayed until 5.45pm which meant that we would have missed our flight to Gatwick. US airways managed to reroute us so that we caught a flight to Philadelphia and then from there to Gatwick. The return flight did not seem so bad, mainly because it was overnight and we managed to get a few hours sleep. We landed at Gatwick at 9.15 GMT.