Pittsburgh: Great Place to Raise a Little Boy

I was just reflecting today on what a great place Pittsburgh is to raise a little boy. This morning Felix and I took the next in our recurring series of bus excursions to downtown Pittsburgh. We started by driving to a park-and-ride bus stop on Pittsburgh's MLK Jr. East Busway, which runs alongside the railroad tracks.

While we were waiting for our bus to arrive, a train approached the bus stop and had barely passed it when we boarded our bus and started "chasing" the train. We would gain ground on the train only to stop at the next stop and have the train regain some of its lost ground, until we finally passed it for good after a few stops.

Then before we had quite gotten all the way downtown, we saw yet another train. We got off the train downtown and walked to a subway station at the US Steel building, where we rode an elevator and an escalator, and saw one subway train pass in the opposite direction before our own subway train arrived. When we got off the subway two stops later, we rode another elevator (I remembered to let Felix press the buttons this time).

We then went to a mall where we bought and ate gourmet chocolates before walking to the Heinz 57 Center, where we rode the elevator (again!) to my office on the 12th floor, played with the copier, and had some M&M's. Then on the way home, we rode another bus and saw at least three more trains!

For a little boy who loves nothing more than trains, busses, gizmos, gadgets, pressing buttons, riding elevators, and eating chocolates, it doesn't get much better than that! The only way it could have been any better would have been if the temperatures had been 20 degrees warmer.

We managed to do all this for just $2.34 (IF you count the quarter we gave a panhandler we encountered). We could have done even better than this, except for springing for the ultra-premium price of the three chocolates we bought.