Yo - So We Continued To A1A Beachfront Ave!

For all you Vanilla Ice fans out there - Saturday morning we drove down the A1A down to Miami Beach. The boats that are moored literally next to the main road are huge! The street seems to be lined with small size cruise boats!

This boat/ship was moored right alongside the road

We parked the car and headed straight for the beach - its been so long since we have had hot weather AND a beach! We walked down the beach and went for a swim and a sun bake (Kristy got so so burnt!). Sea planes flew overhead, lapping the beach and promoting beer and parties at nightclubs (including the pink taco party!)

Ryan on Miami Beach

Kristy on Miami Beach

We walked up Beach Ave, along all the restaurants and shops. Miami Beach is very cool!

We then drove into downtown Miami and went to 'Little Havana' - a suburb with a high Cuban population. Firstly we went to Domino Park. This is a courtyard full of tables where the locals come and play domino's against each other, and it is not taken lightly! They have a security guard on site to ensure there are no fights. A fight between 2 men almost broke out while we were there!

Domino Park

We then walked down the road a few blocks to a cigar factory. The man there was really nice and showed us the machines they used to make cigars and let us take some photos too.

Ryan at the cigar factory

After a short stop at Miami wharf for a beer and pina colada, we went back to Miami Beach for more beer and pina colada's and some dinner.

We saw this guy as we were driving back to Miami Beach. We thought he was weird just by the Spiderman toy he had hanging from the rear view mirror. Then he pulled out a karate hand puppet and was making the puppet punch him in the face as he was driving! Strange man.

Florida!

Friday morning we woke up around 2 am, got ready and left for Pittsburgh airport.
Our flight departed at 6am via Atlanta and we arrived in Orlando around 10.30 in the morning. We picked up our hire car and drove 1 hour east to the Kennedy Space Centre, better known as NASA. Here we got to look through the shuttles astronauts, such as Neil Armstrong and the Apollo 11 crew rode in to the moon. There were also rockets on display that had been in to space, some of them we could look in. We watched an Imax film about landing on the moon too.

We were on a tight time line (as usual) so we had to leave (not before we tried to get in to the grounds where they actually launched the rockets from, but got denied) and headed to our check in at Fort Lauderdale, about 3.5hrs away from the space centre.

Ryan (far left) in front of a rocket

Kristy in front of a rocket

We checked in, then it was time to leave to see (baseball) Miami Marlins defeat the San Diego Padres 5-4. It was a great game, and we had the cliche hot dog and beer/wine for dinner! Its a shame the Marlins didn't get one more point, otherwise there was free donuts and coffee for everyone in the crowd!

At the baseball

Ryan with beer and hotdog (with the works)

Pittsburgh

We had a clear and sunny sky on Sunday, so we drove to Pittsburgh for the day. Pittsburgh is located where the Ohio, Monongahela and Allegheny rivers all meet. Downtown Pittsburgh has 15 major bridges crossing the rivers (with something like 720 bridges within the city limits). The rivers are the second busiest inland ports in the USA.

First stop was at The Strip - a street downtown with some cool shops and markets. We grabbed a coffee and biscotti (Pittsburgh is known for its biscotti, really just a biscuit)and had a walk around The Strip.

We then drove across the rivers to ride the Duquense Incline - a rail cart that takes you to the top of Mount Washington. There were some beautiful views from the top.

A cart going up the incline

The view

Looking down as we are going up

After riding the cart back down, we drove to the top of the second incline in Pittsburgh - the Monongahela Incline and walked around the top of Mount Washington. The views were really nice, and have been voted the second best views in the USA. Apparently these carts were used for the filming of Flashdance too!

You can see 4 of the 15 downtown bridges in this shot. Normally a water fountain would be running in the circle.

We rode the cart to the bottom of the hill to Station Square, and had lunch on the river front at a pub. We browsed some shops, rode back up to our car and went for a drive through downtown Pittsburgh.


We then went back to The Strip to get some fresh seafood for dinner (where Kristy and another unfortunate toilet experience - a Chinese lady thought she would like to share her bathroom shenanigans with me, but we wont go in to details!)


We then drove through the historic Mexican War Streets, which housed some really old town houses, before heading home and calling it a day.

Penn's Caves

Friday night we went out for dinner to the Outback restaurant - a supposedly Australian restaurant, although the boomerang and koala pic's on the wall was about all there was Australian about it! It was a nice dinner though.

Saturday morning we drove 31/2 hours East to Central Pennsylvania's Penn Caves. Penn Caves is an underground cavern with a river running through it. The cavern is believed to be 30 million years old, and is full of stalagmites and stalactites. For some strange reason, the Americans feel compelled to name every rock formation they find, even though they look nothing like it. For example, the Statue of Liberty stalagmite is below.

Yep - this is supposedly the Statue of Liberty formation

The opening of the underground cavern

After the cavern tour, we went on a safari like tour through the property - they have hundreds of animals including black bear, white and black wolves, bobcat, elk, deer (including white deer), Texas long horn cattle and bison. We also saw a ground hog (which we see all the time now, especially running up the side of the road), chipmunks along with birds and ducks.

A white wolf - this one was the dominant male

White deer - isn't it gorgeous?

We learnt some really interesting stuff from the guide, who is also the animals vet.

* Deer shed their antlers every year. They have only just started growing back now, and grow between an inch and an inch and a half daily

* Elk antlers grow faster - around 2 inches daily

* Sometimes male bears don't go in to hibernation - instead they try and find a female to mate with. If the female is nursing a cub, the male will try and kill it.

* Bear have babies premature -and only carry them for 6 weeks before giving birth

* All wolves have yellow eyes with a black ring around them, even if they are cross-bred.

Bison

We had a great day, and the animals were so cute, especially the bears who looked so playful and cuddly, although wouldn't like to be in the cage with them!

The black bear was showing off!

Oh! And we saw a moose too! Ha! Ryan bought this hat for the boys to wear wakeboarding!

Philadelphia is Like Another Planet Man - Welcome to Mars!

This is how we were greeted by some freaky looking guy in massive over sized bright orange sunglasses, after another freaky guy was screaming obscenities to himself and then threw a few our way cause we were laughing at him.
Yep, Philadelphia is full of weirdo's and wacko's, but it is a cool city and has some interesting sites like the Liberty Bell and those famous stairs that Rocky ran up.
We also had our first stunning weather - 80F or about 22C.

Lucky there were 'Emergency Pull Off's' for the traffic on the way!

We left home before 5am Saturday morning. The drive was only supposed to be about 6 hours long, however, as we were entering the city, we hit a massive traffic jam which we were stuck in for over an hour, making our trip 7hrs long.

Ryan in front of the Benjamin Franklin Bridge

After checking in, we caught the subway downtown and walked to the Italian Markets, and had (a rather average) lunch at a seafood shop. We walked back up through town to Old City, where you can find the Liberty Bell (which gained a large crack in it after ringing it for George Washington's Brithday), Liberty Hall (where the first American congress was held - Philadelphia was the first Capital City of the USA, but only lasted 10 years) through to the oldest continually occupied residential street in the USA and the Benjamin Franklin Bridge.

Kristy with the Liberty Bell - notice the crack in the bell?

The 'Love' statue in Philadelphia City Centre

We caught the subway back to the City Centre, and looked at the City Hall, Chinatown and the Reading Terminal Markets, the largest markets in the USA. After walking around for a while we ducked back to the hotel, before having dinner at a nice organic cafe in University City.

Sunday, we walked to 30th st Station (train station), had a look around and some brekky. We caught the subway to the City Centre and walked down to the Philadelphia Art Museum - where we found the infamous stairs Rocky ran up. After we had our photo with Rocky, ran up the stairs and yelled 'Adrian - I done it!' we walked back to the Reading Terminal Market and had some Indian for lunch, before catching the subway back to our car for the trip home.

Rocky Kristy and Rocky Ryan with Rocky

Adrian - I done it!

Splash Lagoon

Monday night, with not much else to do, we decided to hit Splash Lagoon - Erie's local indoor water slide park. There weren't many people there at all, so we never had to line up.

The Giant Bucket tipping over

The slides were really cool - some of the started off inside the building, went outside the building, then came back in again. Other ones had a section in the middle of the slide kind of like a whirlpool, where you would go round and round until you lost speed and went down the middle. Another one has a speed of 40mph (or 60km).
There was also this giant bucket on top of a massive kids play land (which we went up of course!) - every 15minutes or so, this giant bucket would fill up and an alarm would sound throughout the building. Then it would tip over and pour water on everyone in the play land - it held heaps of water too. We will put some photos up soon!

Inside Splash Lagoon

Some of the slides go outside the building

Country Side PA

This weekend was a relatively relaxing one compared to previous weekends.
After a big night on Friday night (we went to our Friday night Happy Hour special with Cheryl, then out for more drinks with Ryan's mates from work), Ryan was pretty hungover on Saturday which made for fun driving!
We made our first stop at Meadville, an old country town, to visit the longest continuous market house in Pennsylvania. It took us a whole 2 minutes to walk through. So we kept driving on the hunt for some scenic waterfalls. The country side really is beautiful in PA. We didn't find any waterfalls, but we found some really nice rivers and creeks, as well as an awesome scenic outlook. When we got home we went to our local to order our new favourite and ever popular food - chicken wings - for dinner.

A nice creek we found

This was on the banks of the creek - nice huh?

Our Beast

Ryan on top of the scenic lookout

On Sunday, we had all intentions of going to Pittsburgh for the day, however, the rain, snow and extremely bad fog stopped us from going there. So instead we drove to a little country town to visit Fallingwater.
Fallingwater is a house designed by American architect Frank Lloyd Wright in 1935 in rural southwestern Pennsylvania, about 50 miles southeast of Pittsburgh. The house is built right alongside a really pretty creek, and part of the house was built over a waterfall! It was a beautiful house too (giving us some ideas for when we get home!).