I crawled out of bed before Mark awoke and snuck off to Weirton for some quality time with my Kroger. It was cold as a witch’s tit outside and I actually even saw some snow on my windshield going over the hill, but it all pretty much ended by the time we REALLY ventured out into the world for breakast at Ritter’s. I love Ritter’s…

And I hate Giant Eagle. After a couple of visits, I’ve decided that it is one of the single worst supermarket chains I’ve ever patronized. And I’ve patronized a lot of grocery chains. The stores are a tacky merchandising mess and the employees range from incompetent to down righ surly. Of course, they have a virtual monopoly in Pittsburgh, and it shows. Sorry. Just had to get that off my chest…

 

Today, we toured Shadyside and some of the outlying areas on the way south to Charleroi, which is where Mark’s father and aunt were born. We saw the old family homestead and drove through the surprisingly large and active downtown, before stopping at the Sunoco and getting on the Turnpike. We got a price break because the toll collectors were in the last day of a strike…

Lunch was at a very sucktastic Bob’s Big Boy in a service plaza. And we actually made it to Baltimore at a reasonable enough hour to have dinner there, at a passable pizza place in Timonium, before touring the bridges and tunnels by night…

   

Pittsburgh continues to be one of my favorite cities on a purely aesthetic basis. It’s just a quite fascinating place to drive around in, even though I realized I hadn’t driven any at all on my last visit and was therefore less familiar this time than I might have liked…

We had lunch at the Plaza Restaurant, where I was about half the age of every other patron in the place (and which made me consider asking for a booster seat for Mark), and then started finding our way around the neighborhoods of Pittsburgh, concentrating today more on the hills and the more dense areas by the rivers. We also visited The Strip so I could visit the old abandoned, factory which had so fascinated me in 1997. It was now even older, even more abandoned, and even more fascinating…

As evening hit, we made a 30-mile trek across West Virgina to Steubenville OH, adding two states to Mark’s list with very little effort. On the way back, in Weirton WV, I saw one of the most beautiful and ancient (but still open) Kroger stores ever, and vowed to return in the morning for a good photo…

As sometimes happens, we ended up having dinner at the Olive Garden…

   

This was another rather long day. We toured Baltimore in the morning (or in the part of the morning which was left after we finally got up) and had a run of very bad luck accidentally turning onto really scary ghetto streets. I have a pretty high tolerance for frightening neighborhoods, but these were like Detroit scale…

Despite all this, Baltimore is still one of my favorite places. I’ve been spending time in the region since I was a kid, and I fell in love with the city itself when my friend Duncan lived there in the late 1980s. It’s such a strange hybrid of southern and northern, and it’s just plain purty, even the decay…

Anyway, we finally found our way out and had lunch before touring the more comforting northeastern side of town, finding that the neighborhood we like in just about every other city also exists in Baltimore, along Harford and Belair Roads near Northern Parkway and the Overlea Diner, where we wouldn’t actually eat until the return trip a few days later…

We finally left Baltimore by 3:00 or so, thinking it would be about seven hours to Albany. We were a little off on the timing, and all the assorted turnpikes were absolute raging nightmares. There were, however, some bright moments, at least for me. I got my Roy Rogers fix, and also got to romp through an actual A&P in New Jersey. And Mark marvelled at a well-stocked Stop & Shop in New York…

Finally, sometime around 1:00 in the morning, we arrived in Schenectady at Duncan and Rick‘s house…

 

We left relatively early today for the Triangle, Richmond, and Baltimore. It was a very long day, starting with a drive-by through Durham (including my first visit to a Super Target) and lunch in Chapel Hill with Becky, with whom my contact has been too limited of late, through no fault of hers…

We also poked around Raleigh for an hour or two, and Mark seemed to rather like it there. We somehow managed not to have dinner until about 9:00 at a KFC/Taco Bell in South Hill, Virginia. It was 1:00 in the morning before we pulled into out motel in Baltimore and pounced on each other…

A new section on the site: Photography. The idea is that I tend to take pictures of some of the same sorts of stuff over and over again, so this is a place where I can post some of my favorites and not have to do a bunch of commentary if I don’t feel like it…

The three themes to start are LA, Fresno, and Mid-century in the Bay Area. More to come. Planet SOMA will continue to be reserved for themes and photo essays centering on the underside of San Francisco…

The rules are that I’m starting fresh with only photos and digital photos. There will be none of the video captures which were mainstays of this site for years, and which will probably continue to pop up from time to time…

You never know what themes might be added after the upcoming East Coast Road Trip whose itinerary the hubby has so conveniently freed me from having to detail, even though I wasn’t really planning to anyway…