I found the Lonely Planet book, Experimental Travel, in Ollie’s Bargain Outlet in Greensburg (if you haven’t been to an Ollie’s, and you are driving through small town USA, you really need to pull over and check out one, especially if you are into drugstore overstock and bargain book tables). It’s a ‘how to’ book of off-beat exploration experiments to try when you are broke, afraid, have tried everything crazy there is to do when you travel or if you are just a boring person who has to be told how to think creatively.
But what I love most about this book is that it affirms my views on travel as being not just about physically going to a place, but about stepping outside of your everyday world and into another world. In the chapter “Domestic Travel,” the author asks readers to do just that: Trade places with a family member or friend and live their life for one day, or even a week. “Literary Journey” asks us to walk over to our bookshelves or local libraries and simply read. I spent most of my childhood (and adulthood) buried in books – I love their smell, the cover art, an irregular book size, their tight, clean pages crinkling as I turn them to find out what happens next. They are portable worlds. When I can’t go anywhere, books or exploring my neighborhood as a tourist are all I have to escape ordinary life on days when I really need it.
These suggestions seem really obvious, but it’s hard to put into words sometimes why travel is so much a part of me. I am always dreaming about the next adventure. I remind myself that travel is not about the place, but the people who make up that place. Sometimes I can remember in faded terms the names of monuments or city streets, but I can remember very strongly the people who have affected me.
I miss Tamara in Nova Gorica and Andrija in Osijek and in my mind’s eye I am walking along the train tracks in Nova Gorica. It is March, very windy, my hands in my red coat pockets. There are palm trees planted in somebody’s back yard on the Italian side of the border, in contrast to the Julian Alps view on the Slovene side. I have a few weeks till I am home again in the States, but I don’t yet know this. It is just enough to be here with no plan, even though it is frightening. It is where I am meant to be at that moment.
Filed under: Culinary Adventures, Pennsylvania, United States | Tags: lincoln highway, route 30, bedford, taxidermy, coffepot, gravity hill, ligonier, steakhouse, big mac, museums, americana, flea markets
Last month, I traveled down Route 30 from Pittsburgh to Bedford with my husband Jeff, and our friends Bill, Dan and Beth. The Pennsylvania part of the old Lincoln Highway actually starts somewhere near our home in Pittsburgh, and slides into commercial highway near Philadelphia. Here are some stops we made along the way to Hokee Gee’s, a giant flea market in Bedford, our final destination (Jeff is totally addicted to trash. We have to buy a house soon – we’re running out of room to store all the scary taxidermy and post-mortem photos we collect in these places), before coming full circle home.
Gravity Hill 
If you google “gravity hill” you will find that there are others like this in America – a road that defies the laws of physics. Cars roll backwards despite them moving forward and water runs in the opposite direction (or something like this — this site can explain it so much better). The one in New Paris, PA is on a beautiful winding back country road dotted with farms and a bubbling creek running alongside of it. Not one of us in the group is science-minded, so it took us a few tries to figure out how to drive the car but lo and behold, Beth and Bill got it figured out – they looked as if they were rolling uphill, when they were really rolling downhill. Pretty impressive.
Ed’s Steakhouse 
a word from Beth:
“By the end of the day, we were all hungry and feeling very picky about what we were going to eat. It had to be diner-like, it had to serve tons of awesome food, and it had to have spaghetti and meatballs for Lisa.
So we asked a local where to go. “The Colonial Inn,” he said. We asked again “the Colonial Inn.” But on the way to the Colonial Inn, we saw the sign for Ed’s Steakhouse, and decided that any restaurant with a sign that cool had to have delicious food.
And we weren’t disappointed! Ed’s even provided more than we had hoped – chairs with wheels! Geriatric diners! Van-sized families! Postcards and five-cent mints by the register! Spaghetti & meatballs! It was the kind of dining experience we’d been missing since the last Pappan’s closed.
Unfortunately, we soon found out that although our souls were craving family restaurant food, our bodies would have been perfectly happy to never eat fried chicken and chocolate mousse ever again. We spent the ride home clutching our tummies and looking for gas station bathrooms.” (and thank god we found one; we were still two hours from home. — editor’s note)
The Coffee Pot 
My friend Jason told me recently that he grew up a few blocks away from this crazy-giant structure that once served as a stop for weary travelers bumping along the Lincoln Highway. I always wonder what it’s like to live in a tourist town such as Bedford. It is beautiful and haunted and far from everything - being a city girl, that’s how it would feel to me since I have lived in the city most of my life. While I took artsy pictures of it (me, lying on my back in the grass to get the full view of it with my limited 35 mm lens), the other four, bored as kids, had found someone’s geo-caching stash buried underneath the Coffee Pot historical plaque. Before Jeff could take out all the tiny toys and put them in his pocket, I knew it was time to keep rolling.
Joe’s Bar
“One of the most amazing taxidermy collections outside of a museum.” – Jeff 
But Joe’s is way more incredible and disturbing. The owner has a seal head, a deer’s ass, and a polar bear, not to mention a kangaroo with gigantic nads, all housed in glass cases in the back of his establishment, as well as filling a whole second floor. Walk up the winding staircase and marvel at the elephant head suspended from the ceiling by wing-like cables — its feet are now bar stools (with stiff black hairs still in tact). Chimpanzee skulls, gazelles, a tiger, a hippo and the standard wild boar. And despite Joe’s exotic attractions, it’s still off the beaten path. The bar is pretty ‘local.’ If you don’t mind being ignored by the surly long-haired bartender, then just go for the amazing animal display.
Big Mac Museum
The Lincoln Highway Drive-In radio station 88.3 provided the soundtrack for our ride home – Monsters vs. Aliens was the movie that night. I could see the light flickering from the giant screen, and it reminded me of when my parents took my sister and me to the drive-in for a double feature of Rocky and Invasion of the Body Snatchers. We weren’t allowed to watch the movies, but we got to sleep in the back of the car with the hatchback down. (this is what my young parents had to do back in the recession of the 1970s. Who had money for a babysitter?). As the sun set, the boys were getting hungry again, and I was curious about the Big Mac Museum. The Big Mac was actually created in Uniontown, PA, about an hour away from North Huntingdon, but it was never made clear in the museum display how North Huntingdon ended up with the Museum Honors. We ate apple pies and french fries surrounded by blaring TVs airing retro McDonald’s commercials. “I like Big Macs here,” Dan said, “They have a different measure of quality than other McDonalds’ Big Macs.”
And if you are ever in the Irwin area looking for good thrifting, Beth gave us this tip: “We’ve been to [the Irwin] Goodwill. It’s filled with juggalos.”
We’re totally heading there on our next trash-hunting trip.
