Memorial Day Weekend in Pittsburgh

You may recall that our family has a tradition of holding a small reunion each year in Pittsburgh over the Memorial Day weekend. It's not quite as large as it used to be, with my son Jason and his family living in Germany, but we've still kept it up, and so it was that early Saturday morning, Agnes and I set out with our daughter Yasmin and granddaughters Leya and Elise to visit my father and my sister Lisa and her family for the weekend. While we were en route to Pittsburgh from NoVa, my daughter wondered why we do this to ourselves on a traffic-miserable major holiday, rather than just picking some innocuous time to do it. Good question. I guess there must be a streak of masochism in the family.

But let's talk about the weekend, for which there are - of course - pictures.

When we arrived on Saturday afternoon, our first order of business was to visit my Dad. He lives in a nursing home where one of his joys is his annual tomato garden ... and this year, Leya and Elise were able to help him plant it. Here, Leya shovels her uncle Ed's good compost around the new plants ...

and Aunt Lisa helps Elise try to get more compost in the pot than on the ground, as Uncle Ed, Dad, and cousin Elena look on ...

Here's the finished garden. You may remember the cement plaque next to the lower pot that reads, "Bill's Garden" ... this is the one that all the grandchildren and great-grandchildren made for their (great) granddad a few years ago ...

Gardening can be exhausting work, and Aunt Lisa provided an ice cream bar snack for everyone. Since there weren't enough chairs, Leya made do with sitting on her lumpy Opa ...

Of course, Elise always has to play her favorite game, "Steal Opa's Hat." I think the look on her face says it all ...

On Sunday we took the trolley into downtown Pittsburgh, where Lisa had gotten us all reservations to take a duck boat tour of the city from both the land and the water. Here was our duck boat, "Dahntahn* Dottie" ...

We had a very nice tour through downtown, and learned a lot of interesting tidbits about Pittsburgh history. The Pittsburgh Pirates were playing the Washington Nationals that afternoon, and there was quite a crowd at PNC Park ...

Duck boats, as you may know, are amphibious trucks (originally called DUKWs) that were used by the Army in World War II. Nowadays, many of them are used as tour vehicles in cities with major lakes and rivers ... like Pittsburgh, where the Allegheny and Monongahela Rivers meet at The Point to form the mighty Ohio. Here's a view of Point Park from the river ...

A feature of the duck boat tour was that the operators allowed some of the passengers to actually drive the boat when we were on the water. Naturally, Leya volunteered ... and did a very respectable job ...

Unlike the other children who got to drive the boat, Leya didn't sit down in the seat ... she knelt so that she could see out the windshield. She got visibly irritated whenever the real pilot reached across to tweak the wheel!

Since it was a beautiful and very warm day, after the duck boat tour a stop for ice cream was almost mandatory ... and Elise wasn't going to let Oma get away with foisting off any measly single-scoop cone on her ...

 

After the ice cream break, we walked over to the lower terminal of the famous Monongahela Incline, one of the oldest working inclined railways (funiculars) in the country ...

The incline is 635 feet long and travels up a slope of more than 35 degrees at a speed of six big miles per hour to reach the summit of Mt Washington. Cars depart simultaneously from the top and bottom stations and pass in the middle on each trip, as you can see here ...

Here's a view looking up the track from our seats in the top end of the car as we made the ascent ...

The views from the summit of Mt Washington are, of course, superb. Here's just one of the many great pictures I took of my home town ... which is, I must admit, a great deal more beautiful than it was when I was growing up and the air and rivers were fouled by the output of the steel mills that used to line the waterfront ...

It would be remiss of me to not say something about the people who made the wonderful weekend possible: my sister Lisa and her husband Ed, and their children Eddie and Elena ...

Leya and Elise absolutely love their cousin Elena ...

And they love cousin Eddie, too ... especially because he gives good piggyback rides!

I actually took almost 400 pictures, but these are probably enough to give you the idea that we had a really great weekend. I am truly one of the luckiest men alive to have such a wonderful family!

Have a good day, and be safe as we start the summer season. I need all the readers I can get.

More thoughts tomorrow.

Bilbo

* If you speak Pittsburghese, yinz'll know what it means!