Pennsylvania - Pittsburgh

“I walked five miles to get out of Pittsburgh, and two rides, an apple truck and a big trailer truck, took me to Harrisburg in the soft Indian-summer rainy night. I cut right along. I wanted to get home” (96).

(At this point, Kerouac and I are heading in opposite directions and have different attitudes about home).

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Today was the day I had begun my trip. I'm posting this after-the-fact, but as I anticipated I don't have the opportunity to blog every night. I left home and drove three hours to Ebensburg, PA to see a good friend, then from there stayed the night in Pittsburgh with a friend from college. I took the above pictures in the city before I set out for Ohio, Michigan, and Indiana.

Pennsylvania is considered to be divided up between Pittsburgh and Philadelphia. As pretty much everyone knows, it has more to do with sports than geography. It's not exactly a bustling metropolis like NYC, but sometimes that's a good thing.

On the Road

"The whole mad swirl of everything that was to come began then; it would mix up all my friends and all I had left of my family in the big dust cloud over the American Night.” (5)

“Yes, and it wasn’t only because I was a writer and needed new experiences that I wanted to know Dean more, and because my life hanging around the campus had reached the completion of its cycle and was stultified, but because, somehow in spite of our difference in character, he reminded me of some long-lost brother….I was a young writer and wanted to take off” (7).