Pittsburgh, which is anything but the pits.

I don’t know what I expected of Pittsburgh,

but it was not disarming charm.

We’re staying on the south side. The city is split by three rivers. The Monongahela and the Allegheny join together to make the Ohio which runs into the Mississippi and, eventually, into the Gulf of Mexico.

Our Hyatt on the River hotel gives us a room which looks down upon the Monongahela and the famous Hot Metal Bridge. Up across the water and over new buildings and hills of green trees, we see a magical, high-reaching gothic tower.

After several days here, I realise that this almost fairytale tower is what it is all about. It symbolises the beautiful spirit of Pittsburgh.

It is the “tower of knowledge”.

It is part of a university - Carnegie Mellon - and it is classrooms right to its remarkable top. It is a pinnacle of learning. What a sublimely beautiful concept.

In the mornings, it rises from the mist for me to see through the window. At night, when it is no longer silhouetted against the sky, it has lights on the top so it shines out of the darkness, a beacon.

A vast amount of the city is devoted to the university.

But it is also a city of thought and originality and creativity. Or so it seems to me.

We have a gentle time here. We are spending three days, one of the breaks which make the mighty road trip less road and more experience.

Hence the Hyatt with our river view mini suite - a compact self-contained world complete with kitchen. This is

our first kitchen since Rachel and Bob’s AirB&B in Portland.

Bruce has been hanging out to cook and I have been hanging out to eat what he is going to cook. Spag bol. The ultimate comfort food. I get to do the washing in the division of domestic labour round here.

So, having trundled our world of luggage up to the room, we do our usual exploratory walk, heading for a supermarket. Our route into town had taken us very slowly down Carson Street - a long, long, long, narrow road lined by tall old brick buildings. Characterful,

eccentric, quaint, crowded old buildings. Like an old European town. Edinburgh, perhaps. A busy old road packed with interesting-looking offbeat shops - tat shops and gift shops, tie-die shops and candle shops, tattoo shops, cafes and bars.

We do the grocery shopping, discovering a fabulous five-green-vegetable low-cal pasta. I adore the

American supermarkets. They are huge and full of things to discover. I have to be restrained. Oh, those brilliant flavoured Polar sparkling waters. I don’t know how they do it; clear sparkling water flavoured with cherry or, heaven help me, peaches and cream. No calories. No sweeteners. Why can’t Australia make these drinks?

Ravenous, on the walk home, we chance upon a street chalkboard announcing "Med Lentil Soup" and “FreshSalad”. Yes! It is a tiny wee cafe. A couple of local ladies are head-to-head gossiping over coffee in one corner. The manager stands up from behind a counter laden with chocolates and sumptuous-looking cupcakes to greet us and take our order. We have happened upon

Le Petit Chocolate & Cafe which, tucked in among the old buildings at the wrong end of Carson Street, is a gem of home-made expertise. A classy little niche. We take a window table and devour absolutely gorgeous lentil soup and fresh salad, just as the sign promised. A perfect lunch made all the better capped by perfect macchiatos. Contentment.

We walk on with our shopping, examining fascinating offbeat shops. Dope is not legal here but vape is huge. There are colourful vape shops, cluttered and clever book shops and lots of tattoo parlours. There's some vast and vivid street art. And spontaneous street art. A bare-topped young man is vigorously chalk-drawing a mandala on the pavement ahead of us.

Characterful buildings reach up the steep, leafy hillside which is backdrop to this part of Pittsburgh. Once the home of steelworkers, now bijou residences for a post-industrial time.

The weather has been humid and ominous. Now it delivers its promise by lowering its skies and slamming out torrential rains. This works for us, since we are intending to use this Pittsburgh time for organisation and renewal. We hole up. Read and write. Mend things.

But there are some things one really has to do, fair weather or foul - the Andy Warhol Museum at the top of the list.

We take the hotel shuttle service over the river and into the cultural heart of old Pittsburgh. It has some splendid architecture and quaint, narrow streets as befits an old city. Oh, but look at the theatre district! Theatres everywhere. A joy of them. I have been quite happy to have a break from my life of theatre but the sight of these classic, respectfully preserved traditional theatres has me in a swoon.

We leave them behind to walk over The Andy Warhol Bridge to the Andy Warhol Museum. Yes. True story. They call it the

Andy Warhol Bridge. It is festooned with signs confirming this.

Warhol was a Pittsburgh boy and he is buried here.

This massive art museum in an example of “adaptive reuse” in city architecture. It’s some sort of old warehouse and its airy big rooms on seven floors make it what they say is the world’s biggest art museum devoted to a single artist.

They advise us to start at the top, so we do. It’s a chronological voyage, very detailed and engaging. The museum is new and it has been well considered so one can bone up easily through condensed information displays on each floor.

And thus we walk into the Warhol childhood, through walls of evocative black and white photographs of good dead people. They are mysteriously interesting.

And on through the earliest days of Warhol and then, floor after floor, through his career and life. As we all know, he became odder as he became older. And yet, always absurdly edgy and defiantly creative. One visits all sides of his character as one moves about the museum. It is good to be unhurried. The place is very quiet, few visitors. There is one tour group listening to a

motor-mouthed docent. She seems to be sucking the life out of her subject. I don’t eavesdrop for long.

There’s an immersion room of the Velvet Underground. Throb, twang, throb. Moving images on the wall. Huge, messy flop beds on the floor. I linger and let the imagination carry me.

There are the up-yours images,

zillions of them, of Ai Weiwei’s political stance. He and Warhol had many parallels in their political and artistic careers, even cats, and now are partnered in immortality here in the Warhol Museum. Bruce wants to point out to the powers that be that Weiwei’s inclusion means this is not the biggest museum devoted to one artist alone.

Everyone seems a bit confused about where Warhol ends and Weiwei begins.

I realise that I had seen a lot of the exhibition in Melbourne when the

blockbuster Warhol ad WeiWei show was on there. I ask one of the guards and she says that, yes, this is the big collection but it all opened when things returned from Australia. A lot went to Australia, she says. But, you have no idea how much material there is. Indeed, there is so much I have not seen and so much I did not know.

For instance, Andy Warhol was fascinated with taxidermy and he had a stuffed great dane which he treasured because it was believed it had once belonged to Cecil B. DeMille. And he collected odd pottery.

There is lots of learn and to ponder. It is a rewarding experience.

Finally, we toddle out into the rain and return to the cultural heart of Pittsburgh. We walk about. There are homeless people begging on the streets. This is happening all over the country, some places more intensely than others. A young woman breaks my heart. She is thin with long hair in plaits. She sits hunched under an umbrella, her cardboard sign begging money because she is homeless and “afraid”.

I relate intensely to her fear. I give her one of the special dollar coins we were given by chap we met in Milwaukee. I don’t know why he gave us $25 in dollar coins but I have decided they must go to street people.

Later, as we sit out of the drizzle in a small city square waiting for the hotel shuttle to pick us up, I study a young man who, while dressed in fresh clothes and not carrying any possessions, seems to be another sort of down-and-out. He sits on a bench beneath a tree looking mostly at his feet. He does not move much but when he does, it is to look up and gaze around blankly. He has pale blue eyes. Beautiful eyes. But, the saddest eyes I have ever seen. They are devoid

of hope. I wonder why. What have those eyes seen that they no longer wish to see? My thought is that he is a young veteran and the bleak void of his world is the PTSD of time in Iraq or Afghanistan. I grieve for him but, at the same time, am frightened of him.

Our shuttle comes and takes us off around the streets in jolly spirit. We learn more about Pittsburgh because the driver and his girlfriend, who is getting a ride with us, adore this city and want to tell us all about it. For instance, it has hundreds of bridges over the rivers, streams, and railroads. Hundreds. It should be called The City of Bridges.

Our time in Pittsburgh ends too soon.

We have been content here in this once gritty old steelworks city. We think we might come back some time and see it properly.

But now we must continue our journey - via - be still my beating heart - via the famous Frank Lloyd Wright house, Fallingwater

.

It is quite a drive to find it, through meandering valleys and country roads. It is mountainous. It is remote. It is raining.

We pass through Normalville. Who dared to name that place?

It advertises rod and gun, bait, ammunition, crossbows, and corn.

It advertises Yogi Bear’s Jellystone Park and The Speedy

Needy Garage.

Just outside the town is a peculiar double fountain over a lake with a viewing deck. It seems to be a shrine to God. A large slate tablet bears The Ten Commandments.

Donegal comes. Beer ads and gun ads. Trump signs. Fastidiously mown grass.

It certainly does not seem the sort of country culture which would lure Lloyd Wright or the wealthy Kauffman family for

whom Fallingwater was built as a weekender. Perhaps the rural spirit was softer in the 1930s.

The carpark at Fallingwater has as many glorious flowers in it as it has cars. And it has a lot of those. We are early. We find a spot and check out the arrangements. We have booked our tour by phone. They warned us that they were busy and we are scheduled at 11.30am. We are told by a charming Nepalese

staffer that we are in Tour 20 and to gather on the path when our number is called. Put bags in lockers in the ladies room.

We are in a round open pavilion surrounded by woodland. It has a very tropical feel to it - and a musty organic fragrance with the fresh rain in the surrounding undergrowth. The information desk is in the centre. Five covered arms splay out from this large round, wooden pavilion, each one ending with enclosed rooms. They house the gift store, the rest rooms, the cafe and an architecture history information

centre.

Two million people have been through Fallingwater since it opened to the public and they roll the tours through at 15 minute intervals each with about 15 people. They were showing 500 through on this day, said Galen, our tour guide. They have it down to a fine art, of course. There is more than one tour in the house at any given time and we see the one behind us, but we don’t

really converge until the end when we sit in what used to be the garage to watch a video and get the hard sell about supporting Western Pennsylvania Conservancy which needs a lot of money to keep the house and its environs going.

The house is superb.

It is everything one knew or imagined of it.

It is just a wonderful sensation to be there, to really be in that house one has seen for so many years in books and magazines and documentaries. The most celebrated private house in the world. The most renowned piece of domestic architecture.

It was nominated as the 8th Wonder of the World, but lost out to Machu Picchu.

I am pinching myself all the time.

It feels so familiar and also so welcoming.

It has been preserved as if the occupiers have just stepped out for a while. It is eminently liveable.

It is bigger than I envisaged. The main living room with its great stone floor is quite a vast expanse. I did not realise that it had a stairway leading down to the water, a place where people could dangle their feet while drinking champagne, or go for a swim or a paddle beneath the main room. They also had a swimming pool up on the upper guest level where Edgar Kauffman Jr. lived. It is now occupied by a frog

they have dubbed “Frog Lloyd Wright”, grins Galen.

Of course, the sound of the water is pervasive at Fallingwater.

And water, itself. It also seeps from the hillside and onto the rocks inside parts of the house.

The way the rocks blend into the house is almost as beautiful as the way the house blends into the landscape and the waterfall.

There are so many details in the design, so many damned clever ideas which were so far ahead of their time. The use of glass. Oh, the windows. The outside comes in.

It is a work of genius.

It ran way over budget but its owners truly lived in it and loved it. It carries their character as well as its designer’s.

There are a number of Picassos and several powerful Diego Rivera paintings in the house. Good art but not too much of it. Galen said Rivera and Frieda Kahlo were among the many guests who had stayed there, although no one knows in which guest room.

After our tour, we wander in the gorgeous grounds. One is not permitted to photograph while on the tour, only afterwards - and this is not easy, as it happens.

But the house imprints so intensely on the mind’s eye that one does not mind.

We pause for lunch at the cafe before we hit the road. A stunning salad. The Kauffmans, who owned a big department store in Pittsburgh, were foodies and there is even a cookbook devoted to Fallingwater. It is one of the few interesting things in the gift store. The store has lots of books and jewellery based on Lloyd Wright design, but otherwise it is a contrived souvenir business and it is really just a massive upmarket assortments shop. Just nice gifties. Overpriced. Nonetheless, it is doing a roaring trade. I buy postcards, of course.