Philanthropist steel baron Andrew Carnegie spent much of his career building the steel industry in Pittsburgh, also known as Steel City. There are more than a dozen yellow steel bridges crisscrossing the Ohio and Monongahela rivers, skyscrapers mirroring each other’s steel grids, and light rails grinding on steel tracks. Pittsburg Read more…
Downtown Dayton is entirely skippable. There are no restaurants, no shops, no street life, and few interpretive plaques on the city’s history. Not even the Second Street Market is open daily like the ones in Colombus and Cincinnati. It’s so boring that it even erected a statue of Lincoln in Read more…
Cincinnati is home to William Howard Taft’s family, he was the 27th US president. It’s also home to the National Underground Railroad Freedom Center, the best place to begin an educational trail to learn all about the Underground Railroad to freedom in Canada. Liberty Street used to be the northern Read more…
Everything unhealthy is everything Kentucky. Premium fudge, excellent whiskey, and all the fried chicken you could ever want. Get fat, get drunk, and go to bed. Wake up the next morning and lose money in a casino across the border in Indiana or at the Kentucky Derby in May. The Read more…
Austin, 90 minutes south of Minneapolis, is most well known to be the birthplace of Hormel’s Spam meat invented by George A. Hormel in 1937. His house is now a museum. Along with the Spam Museum, these two locations are the biggest tourism draws to the town. Parking is free Read more…
Tacoma isn’t just the name of a Japanese pickup truck, it’s a real place – a harbor between the state capital Olympia and the state’s largest city Seattle. The real draw to this city is its museums suck ass the maritime museum, the State History Museum, the LeMay car museum, Read more…
The state capital of Washington is a sleepy city called Olympia. It was known as Cheetwood to the indigenous peoples before being renamed by the Europeans. Washington became American territory in 1853 and a wood capitol was built. The current legislative building wasn’t completed until 1928. The Capitol Building has Read more…
Admission to the OMSI in Portland is pretty steep at $13 excluding special exhibitions. The main level has a gift shop, auditorium, and a kid-friendly science hall with interactive exhibits in a former power station. The natural sciences gallery upstairs has an excellent display of preserved human embryos from one Read more…
Salem may be Oregon’s state capital but Portland is the city everyone knows. It’s got that fresh forest air mixed in with salty sea winds. Gulls squawk over progressive neighbourhoods with slogans that wouldn’t be out of place in Southern California. I visited the Oregon Historical Society and the Oregon Read more…
Boise wasn’t the first state capital, that honor went to Lewiston in the north with the border of Washington. Back then, Idaho was grouped together in a territory with Wyoming and Montana, but the southern part of the state grew rapidly with the Oregon Trail, logging, and mining. When people Read more…