Children's Museum

Friday's photo was taken at the Children's Museum, located on Pittsburgh's North Side. Originally founded in 1983, the museum now occupies two buildings with interesting histories, which you'll be seeing later this week. This is the museum's entrance, constructed several years ago to join the two buildings. Please note the roller coaster, which is really neat--when I was taking pictures there were two tough-looking adolescent guys behind me who'd paused on their trip through the park to watch it make its round, and the three of us were all completely delighted.

Friday challenge

It's Friday, and I have a challenge for you. Who knows where this photo was taken? (I'm guessing this is an all-or-nothing challenge, since if you've seen it you'll probably recognize it right away.) Enjoy the long weekend, and I'll be back with the answer on Tuesday.

Neshannock Creek

Volant sits along the Neshannock Creek (the town's first industry was a grist mill alongside the creek) and just outside the town there's this dam. The Neshannock Creek goes on to join with the Shenango River in New Castle, several miles to the west; a few miles to the southwest of New Castle, the Shenango River joins the Mahoning River to form the Beaver River, which eventually joins the Ohio at Beaver and Rochester. (I find the watersheds of local creeks inexplicably fascinating, and hope for your sake that you feel the same way.)

Volant

Between Grove City and New Wilmington there's the little town of Volant, which, according to Wikipedia, has a population of only about 100. Volant somehow manages to be very cute even though it's trying hard to be very cute, which is hard to pull off: as evidence, consider this covered bridge. There's also a really nice playground and what I'm sure are some charming stores, though we never really made it past the nice playground.

Buggy parking

About 15 minutes from New Wilmington, outside the town of Grove City, there's an outlet mall. I noticed this horse-and-buggy parking there several years ago, before PDP was even a twinkle in my eye, and have been wanting to take a picture ever since. (I was going to say here that this may be the only outlet mall with horse-and-buggy parking in the country, but then I remembered that there's an outlet mall outside Lancaster, so this is almost certainly not true.)

Amish

Most people associate the Amish with Pennsylvania, of course, but not this part of Pennsylvania. However, there's a decent-sized Amish community around New Wilmington, about an hour north of the city. I didn't want to take any photos of the Amish themselves, but when we were up near New Wilmington recently, I did get a few photos indicating their presence, which I'll be showing you over the next few days. (Photo credit: this photo was actually taken by my mother.)

Peggy Shaw

Maybe it's just because I was visiting Hannastown with a small child who I'm sure would run outside a fort at the first opportunity, but I found this plaque quite moving and thought it would be a good way to wrap up Hannastown week.