Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
nothing, I got frightened—the traffic, including trucks, was intense. A ramp from a des-
ignated bus route entered the highway ahead of me, and just the other side of it I spot-
ted a small quadrangle of neutral pavement. I sped to it and stopped. I was trapped; I
couldn't go forward or back.
My only choice was to make like a chicken and cross the road. There was a walkway
on the other side, along the river, the entrance to which I'd evidently missed. However,
it was separated from the roadbed by a thigh-high cement divider, and in order to reach
it I'd have to lift my bike over the divider and then get over it myself, so I'd need a siz-
able break in the traffic that was passing in front of me in an unrelenting crisscross. I
unloaded my bags from my bike and waited on my patch-of-asphalt oasis a full twenty
minutes as cars, trucks, and buses rumbled by at high speed. Finally, I seized a moment,
raced across the road with my bike and just about hurled it over the divider before clam-
bering to safety myself with maybe a few seconds to spare. Then I had to go back to get
my bags, which I gathered in both my arms, and made the mad dash again. I was panting
when it was over, my heart thundering in my chest. It was easily the scariest episode of
the whole journey.
It turns out Pittsburgh has a fairly elaborate network of bike paths, but they don't con-
nect fluidly, and getting from one to the next, or to an actual address in the city, isn't so
easy for someone newly arrived. After I remounted on the walkway, I spent a frustrating
couple of hours finding the way to my hotel. I crossed several bridges, rode several side-
walks, and found myself in more than one construction zone. The last stretch of the day
began with a brutish climb up Greenfield Avenue from the river to the borough of Squir-
rel Hill. Then there was a nasty descent on a rutted sidewalk to the Homestead Grays
Bridge—named for the old Negro leagues baseball team—which crossed high above the
Monongahela and brought me to one more dangerous intersection before depositing me
at the shopping mall and the motel.
As I checked in, feeling one hundred percent safe for the first time in a few hours, I
found myself thinking about Scott Fisher, the owner of the Fort Laurens Antique Trad-
ing Company, in Bolivar, a regular stop on the eastern Ohio antiquing trail. I had met
him, and the manager of his store, Allen Miller, at the bar of an Italian restaurant, where
I'd stopped for dinner two nights earlier and they were having an argument about the
Cincinnati Reds. (I don't remember the exact bone of contention, but I did give them the
name of the player they were looking for: Tom Seaver.) It was raining that night—it had
rained all day—and to reward me for solving their problem, Mr. Miller promised me bet-
ter weather the next morning.
