Jason and I decided to make a pit stop in Pittsburgh on the way to Eddie and Katie's wedding Labor Day weekend. The plan to grab some food and then head to the Pirates-Nationals game at PNC Park, which Kevin said is a must-see stadium. (We also considered heading to Philadelphia for the Phillies-Brewers game, but Phiily was a few hours past our final destination, which would have made for an even longer day of driving.) The weather did not look good at we got near Pittsburgh, but we decided to drive downtown, park, and look for someplace to grab food and a couple of drinks (we arrived well in advance of game time). By the time we made are way out of the ramp it had started pouring and had gotten really windy. We waited under the overhang of the garage for a few minutes for the rain to let up, which also gave us the chance to chat with a few locals about where to go. We decided to brave the rain and headed the ~10 blocks to the Sharp Edge - a place with a ridiculous beer selection and probably the best "Buffalo Bites" (i.e., boneless wings) we've ever tasted. By the time we left the bar a few hours later to head to PNC Park it was no longer raining, but the sky was still pretty dark. The stadium is just on the other side of the river that separates the downtown area of Pittsburgh from the "North Shore." A view of the stadium from the bridge next to the stadium, which they close to traffic for games; as you can see, the weather did not look too promising.
We bought a couple of tickets, entered the stadium, and headed in search of Primanti Bros., the Pittsburgh sandwich place that Kevin would not shut up about (he kept sending me texts that said "Go to Primanti Bros."). A super friendly worker pointed us in the right direction. Here's a picture of Jason eating the sandwich we split - as you can see the sandwich has fries on it - how Primanti Bros.'s does sandwiches.
My the time we got to our seats, it was sunny. A few other pictures from our seats in the park, which faced the river and had a great view of downtown Pittsburgh.
A picture of Jason and I in our seats.
Our thoughts: PNC Park is awesome (Kevin, you were totally right)! Pittsburgh seems like a pretty cool city too. We really liked what we saw of the downtown area, lots of theaters, art galleries, and great architecture - the streets are really narrow which makes the tall buildings even more imposing. I was surprised when I looked up the population of Pittsburgh and saw that it is only roughly 312,000 people, about half the size of Milwaukee. To me, Pittsburgh had the feel of a much larger city. Another thing that we noticed was that the people we met were all super friendly, an endearing quality and definitely not what I expected.
More to come on the rest of our trip to PA.
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