2nd Annual Thanksgiving Roadtrip

Happy Thanksgiving! Last year Mom and I went on a road trip to see some upstate New York National Park sites over the long weekend so I consider this trip to be the 2^nd Annual Thanksgiving Road trip. I went to 5 more NPS sites in Southwestern PA. For a while now I’d been thinking about doing these parks as a quick weekend trip but other bigger trips took precedence. With only 3 days off for Thanksgiving I figured now was the perfect time to do the trip. It was kind of a last minute jaunt and I didn’t do much planning (which is unheard of for me). I just had the destinations in mind and the rest I would figure out along the way. I went to leave bright and early Friday morning when I realized that I had the non-functioning GPS cord and the one that worked was either in Don or Amber’s car (both of whom were gone working Black Friday). I had a map and figured this kept in the theme of not planning so I left without too much worry.

My first stop was the Allegheny Portage Railroad which was a really cool place. The Allegheny Portage Railroad was the first railroad constructed through the Allegheny Mountains in central PA. It consisted of a series of 10 inclined planes and connecting levels that were used to transport railroad cars and canal boats over the Allegheny Mountains for approximately 36 miles. It only operated for twenty years from 1834 to 1854 until steam trains took over but it was quite the engineering marvel for its day. Basically they took boats out of the canal, put them on a rail car and ran the cars up and over the Allegheny Mountains. There was a really nice exhibit hall and then I headed out into the cold to see the main incline and engine house. At the top of one of the inclines was an engine house that had a display showing how the process worked. It was insane to see how people conceived and executed this idea. They used hemp rope to pull the cars and frequently the rope would break so they soon adopted wire rope (Fun fact: this rope was invented by the same guy who later built the Brooklyn Bridge).

There was also an old boarding house to walk through. I was amazed at the hideous bright yellow paint color on the wall and was wondering why the Park Service would use it (it is called The Lemon House after all). Later, I came across a sign that said the paint color is an accurate reproduction of the color used in that time period and Lemon was the name of the family who operated the establishment.The tavern was for men and filled with alcohol, dead animals and rattlesnake skins while the parlor was for the ladies. There was also a dining room. After leaving the house I decided to walk down the incline to the Skew Arch Bridge. The bridge design was to accommodate a bend in the road, hence the skewed arch. Nowadays it is located in the median of a highway. The trail to it basically dumps you out on the side of a highway with no cross walk so I looked both ways and ran across. I’ve never seen a bridge like this before and I thought it was pretty neat. On the climb back up to the visitor center I really got to appreciate the inclines these rail cars had to get up; I was breathing pretty heavy by the time I got to the top.