• Ticked another bit of American cuisine off the list – Applebee’s! Actually really good, we had festive chicken and some tenders and it was all really good. Also Dr Pepper on tap. My favourite part of this country so far tbh.
• We survived the night on the worst bed I have ever slept on, coupled with the worst pillows my head has ever rested on. We shall never talk of that hotel again, although my neck and back will be giving me subtle reminders for the foreseeable future.
• I’m starting to see a pattern with the pillows here… they look like the fullest fluffiest meringue you ever saw, the sort of thing you’d see in the promo advertising for Master Chef with Matt Preston crying tears of joy in the background… but put an ounce of pressure on the thing and it collapses so shallow it makes single ply toilet paper look THICC 
. I feel that the RAR and ZIP teams need to investigate the phenomenon because there’s compression at work here that could make my movie downloads much faster.
• We took off from that hotel as fast as our Hemi V8 could take us (which it turns out is quite fast), and immediately pulled in to the nearest servo to refuel. Except it’s called a gas station. I did my first pumping of gas, which involves putting your credit card in the bowser then filling up and then hoping the amount they charge is equal to what you put in. The gas price was in fractions for some reason, so we paid 3 somethings, and 4/5th of something else per “gallon” of “gas”. None of this makes any sense but the needle now points to full so off we go.
• Once again, Pennsylvania delivers with beautiful scenery. Definitely the most picturesque of the places we’ve been thus far, spoiled only slightly by copious amounts of road kill. Up side: we have seen raccoons, porcupines, deer, and what we think might have been a bobcat. Down side: would have preferred to see them alive and whole, rather than at some percentage meat paste.
• We stopped in at Pittsburgh to ride the Duquesne Incline, which is one of my favourite funiculars in the area. Built back in 1887, the damn thing is still running thanks to a preservation group who took over running it in 1963 as a tourism thing after it stopped being financially viable to run as purely transport. Long story short is that there’s a steep hill, and they drag mini trains up it.
• At the top we wandered to a nearby lookout and noted that Pittsburgh has approximately 1000 bridges. Pits-burgh? More like BRIDGE-burgh! Apologies, Erin insisted I put that in my post. Brisbane is going to look the same soon the way they keep throwing new paths over the brown snake. More like BRIDGE-bane!…. that one was all me.
• Saw a pretty decent stack happen right in front of us as we left Pittsburg. This makes accident 3? 4? that we’ve witnessed. On the one hand it’s no surprise the way people drive, but on the other hand… have y’all considered just not driving like knobs? Tailgating s insane. Seems cheaper to just leave a gap rather than write off cars every twenty minutes.
• Final destination was Washington, Pennsylvania. This was definitely a deliberate stop, and not because I picked the wrong suggested destination in the GPS. Another dodgy looking hotel, but this one has a laundromat! So for the third time in my life I’m using a laundromat. This one comes with a Ye Olde heater that somehow uses 25A of power to heat a room only slightly bigger than a typical bathroom. HVAC has come a long way!
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