Today was a big day and didn’t end as we had expected.

Let’s start at the very beginning, a very good place to start.

We got up early and had breakfast at Hartzel House – which was AMAZING. We were sadly a bit rushed as we had to be at a tour of Frank Lloyd Wrights Falling Water by about 8:30am and it was still a half an hour drive away.

Hartzel House was such a lovely place to stay and the owners were great to chat to. We also saw hummingbirds and squirrels from the window as we had our breakfast. I tried hard to get a photo of a hummingbird but they are so fast.

After breakfast we packed up our things and headed over to wherever it was that Falling Water is located. We sort of don’t know where we are anymore, but there are a lot of trees and mountains.

Falling Water was designed by architect Frank Lloyd Wright in 1935. It was designed for the Kaufmann family as their weekend home and then in the 60’s it was donated to be on display to the public. Which is rather nice isn’t it?

Anyway, it’s really cool and we got the full tour all through the house and surrounding grounds and I took about a million photos, but here is a few for you viewing pleasure.

If you wanna see more just ask – I’ve got tonnes of pics!

After we had finished up at Falling Water, lunch was in order. We went to a nearby place that was recommended to us by the owners of Hartzell House. Bittersweet Cafe – Steve had a burger, I had pulled pork sandwich- it was really tasty.

So far, so good. The day was progressing as planned. It was about 2pm by now and the plan was to drive 1 1/2 to Pittsburgh Airport to catch a flight at 6:50pm to take us to Newark, where we would stay in an airport hotel for the night before our catching our flight home to Singapore and on to Perth. This was the plan.

We got fuel and headed off. We liked the name of this place by the Gas Station.

We made it to Pittsburgh airport!

We dropped off our trusty rental car which we were a bit sad to see go and went on in to check in. Actually, we had already checked in online and had checked our flight regularly for any updates but non were forthcoming.

We found the United Airlines counter – and things looked a bit suss from the get go. When it was our turn the mean lady behind the counter was like “nup that flights been cancelled” “never book a flight to Newark in the afternoon” (like we would ever know that? I mean they sold us the ticket right? Then the other (slightly less mean lady) tells us that no that was they earlier flight that was cancelled, ours had just been delayed to like 9:30pm and did we want to go tomorrow ? No we don’t want to go tomorrow as we have a flight to catch, put us on the 9:30pm please. Mean lady grumbled something about it probably being cancelled anyway but would provide no further information to us about anything and took our bags and checked us in.

Ok…so what do we do now? Our boarding passes still had the original flight times on, the departure boards didn’t show our flight 🤷‍♀️ we lined up to go through security because the line was loooonnnng. When we finally got through we tried to find someone to ask. We eventually found the United area but they were busy with a previously delayed flight. So we waited until that flight boarded. Times wasting here folks…

Then Steve goes over to ask – so what’s the deal with our flight? “Oh that’s been cancelled” oh ok. It was already after 6pm by this stage and Newark is like a 5 hour drive away. We had originally planned to drive it but thought we were being so clever by flying up. Duh that will teach us. No there are no other flights tonight. “We can put you on one at 9am tomorrow?” Which MIGHT get you to Newark on time. But also might get cancelled again. The young guy behind the counter was actually quite nice and helpful but there wasn’t really anything he could do. So our only option was to get a car and start driving. But the car rental place had no cars left because I guess others had the same idea. Arghhhhh!!!!! Panic!!!!

Eventually we found that Sixt car rental did have some cars available so we booked one asap, ran through the airport and picked up our luggage that was on the carousel all by itself, tried to buy some snacks with vouchers that United Airlines gave us ($30) but no one would accept them, got our car and got the f@&) out of there. It was already close to 7pm by this stage – so we didn’t think we could make it all the way to Newark, so planned to stay somewhere maybe an hour 1/2 away. Our flight to Singapore the next day wasn’t until 12:50pm so we had enough time….or so we thought….

So we were suddenly thrown in to a late night road trip.

We went through a tunnel and popped out in Pittsburgh – we both exclaimed “Wow” – it was just a really cool looking city with lots of awesome looking bridges. Who knows if it’s *actually* a cool city – we had no time to stop.

Once we were out of Pittsburgh we started to get hungry. Luckily we had picked up some blueberry muffins earlier in the day from Bittersweet Cafe. They were intended to be plane snacks, but now they were equally effective as road trip snacks.

I managed to get crumbs all through the shiny new BMW we had hired. I wondered if this would be covered in the insurance. They were good muffins.

And on we drove, through weird mountainous terrain – it was actually quite spectacular and surreal at the same time.

We made a quick snack and bathroom break at a random road house along the highway. We resisted the urge to buy Burger King or Popeyes Chicken for dinner. Instead we bought a pickle in a bag and some beef jerky – which we failed to eat anyway.

After the snack stop, we started flicking through radio stations and we found some satellite radio stations – one was called Tom Petty radio so we put it on. First up was a DJ who played a heap of great stuff and told great stories, then it got all Tom Petty-ified. So as darkness descended on us and we drove along the highway we were accompanied by Tom Petty tunes. It was actually quite awesome and incredibly fitting. Tom Petty has a lot of songs with lyrics about driving.

I booked a hotel in the small town of Bethlehem- still in Pennsylvania but on the edge of the border. Bethlehem is close to the town of Allentown which you may be familiar with due to the Billy Joel song.

Anyway…after 4 1/2 hours driving we made it to our hotel around midnight. We were happy that they had our reservation and checked in quickly and promptly went to sleep. Nice hotel. But the saga continues….stay tuned…