Sewickley, Pittsburgh, PA

Ever noticed the term "leafy suburbs?"

The ride to Pittsburgh was really nice. Roughly 350 miles through the Appalachians. Mountains, valleys, winding roads and bridges, every now and then the view opens up over wide areas. Especially the last third of it was beautiful. Great!

Logan, laid-back.

In Sewickley I visited the family that hosted me for three weeks as an exchange student fourteen years ago. It was so good to see them all again. I had contacted them and we met in the evening. The timing turned out to be perfect, really lucky! Since Grant, the youngest of the three brothers, had his high school graduation that weekend, the other two guys were in town, too. So I got to see Logan and Blake again! It actually felt a bit surreal. Back then the three of us were around sixteen years old and in school, now we updated each other on our degrees and jobs. My built-in nostalgia kicked in, and so it was beautiful, but also a bit sad. Time so long gone...The last time I saw Grant, he was three and said things like "Mum, I'm big. I drink Coke!" Now he's going off to college...The next morning we had breakfast together, and I stayed there till noon, when they went to Grant's graduation and I looked up some things and then rolled towards Ohio. But first I grabbed some four o'clock lunch at Wendy's, possibly the same place I had visited all these years ago.

Ready for 2014.

I took the old Lincoln Highway, which at times really felt like being in the middle of nowhere. Tons of roadkill, too. Every couple miles there was something rather big lying at the roadside, there even was a young deer. Other than that, it was a nice route, though. It was getting pretty rural soon.

More by chance than by planning I decided to stop for the night in Canton, Ohio. It was there that I saw some ads about the Pro Football Hall of Fame, and I remembered that a colleague of mine had told me about it. So I went there the next day. It was a couple of miles away from the motel, and I decided to take a walk. This turned out a bit cumbersome, by the way. I clearly had underestimated the local car culture. In Canton, they just almost completely have done away with the concept of sidewalks. I ended

Some scattered medical centers.

up walking from parking lot to parking lot, over lawns and at the roadside. In a way the area felt pretty American, with huge parking lots around shop buildings in a giant shopping mall area, which in turn is located on the outskirts of town in a rather rural setting. Into the mix, a cluster of businesses and medical centers is added. All this is dispersed rather generously. This combination of businesses loosely scattered in widely available open space is something I don't know from Germany. Anyway, that's for Memo: