Day #169 – Farewell, Pittsburgh

Boggsville PA to VA

We left the ‘Burgh today, eager to return to our home on wheels.  We love our friends, but we’re ready to return to the road.  We talked about how strange it will be to go from a 3-bedroom farm house to a 30x8 trailer.  We talked about how strange it was to miss our trailer and be eager to get back to it.  We talked about what “home” means.  It appears that “home” has become wherever we are, as long as we’re in our trailer.

We also shopped our feet off.  We started with Ikea, where we found, what we hope will be, the perfect dish rack.  We also found a picture frame we liked and some dish towels.  We then moved on to the new REI out at Robinson Center.  I didn’t like it as much as the one on the South Side.  There was no climbing wall and it just seemed less homey.  The staff was quite helpful.  The space was bigger, but they didn’t seem to have as much good stuff.  Oh, well, we still managed to find things we absolutely needed.  More socks, a book from NOLS (National Outdoor Leadership School) on wilderness skills, a camping game I’d been drooling over for several months (think Trivial Pursuit for the outdoor-set), and the latest issue of Sea Kayaker.  We oogled some cook sets (http://www.rei.com/product/783287) and decided we weren’t doing enough wilderness camping to justify their cost, but they were really cool!

We finally got going in the late afternoon.  We hit some very bad thunder, lightning, and rain in West Virginia, but it cleared up in Virginia.  We missed our exit to Wytheville and ended up at a motel about 40 miles down the road, in a town whose name we cannot remember.  We were both pretty tired and cranky by the time we pulled in.