Usually around this time, I'm looking forward to my favorite time of year - fall, followed by the holidays. Not so much this year. Western Pennsylvania was cheated out of summer this year. Our normally hot weather was exchanged for temperatures averaging in the mid 70's with clouds and occasional rain. I had such big plans for this summer too - lots of bike riding, swimming at the local pool and so forth, but none of it happened. So here we are attempting to cram as much as we can into this last weekend of summer.
On Saturday, we went over to the North Side to eat lunch at Holy Trinity Church's Greek Festival. Although I love Greek food, I haven't been to one of the local festival in years. This is because they are always completely packed with people. Even though we went between lunch and dinner, both the outside tent and inside cafeteria were fairly crowded.
The food, as always, was delicious. We had souzoukakia, spanakopita, moussaka and rice pilaf. Lauren like the rice pilaf the best, while I thought that they outdid themselves on the spanakopita. Thank goodness these festivals are held once a year because not only is the food rich, but so are the prices. We bought 3 of the souzoukakia (which is essentially a meatball) and they were $2.50 each. But hey, it's good food for a good cause.
After we gorged ourselves on food, it was time to work off some of the calories. We traveled over to Allegheny Commons Park to go kayaking on Lake Elizabeth. It sounds impressive, but at knee deep, Lake Elizabeth is more like a big pond. For a half an hour, the three of us paddled in a circle, taking in the sights of goldfish, ducks and dogs wading in the lake.
Since I sat in the front, I was in charge of steering. Mark made fun of me when I ran us into the wall a couple of times, but I eventually got the hang of it.
Lauren went from being a passive observer to actively helping Daddy row.
Contrary to what you see here, there are no rapids on Lake Elizabeth. Mark wants to do the Allegheny River next, but I don't know if my steering skills are up for it.
On Sunday, we decided to go bike riding. We had originally planned to go to Moraine State Park, but at the last minute, Mark suggested that we drive to Washington's Landing to ride the trail that heads into downtown Pittsburgh. This ended up being even better than Moraine because the drive was less than 15 minutes from our house and the trail is almost completely flat. And I like flat.
Yes, that's Lauren riding inside that wee cart trailing behind Mark's bike.
We rode all the way to Carnegie Science Center in no time flat, passing scenic views such as this one of the Convention Center and that building behind it to the left (*smirk*). I told Mark that we should ride the trail every weekend, that is, if it ever stops raining again.
Today we went to an antique fair in Hudson, Ohio, but I will cover that in the next post.
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