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.

Chicago is...

Chicago.

The sky is flashing and strobing the city buildings into a state of sudden white bleach. It is late at night.

The city is roaring. The drone of its dense life is like a jet flying constantly aloft. There is an odd undulating rhythm to it. We are between thunderstorms. The calm between two storms. The last one bellowed and whacked and cracked and pounded the city, hammering it in rain so hard and dense that the buildings next door simply vanished behind its thick grey veil. When the rain stopped, the people reappeared en masse, glamorous and purposeful. Where had they been?

It is Saturday night. This is a party city. This is a boozy city. Restaurants are everywhere amid the high rises. Bars and clubs abound. The streets were packed again with cars, traffic jams, impatience, horns. Chicago is a city of horn-blowers, beaten only by Kuala Lumpur in my experience. It is also a city of sirens. They honk and wail throughout the day redoubling their frenzy during storms.

This is a big, vertical city. I look around to windows and more windows. In different degrees of illumination. Lives going on within them. I can make out art on walls, TVs flickering. Down below, the traffic hurtling, the people scurrying. Long-haired girls in skin-tight thigh-high sheath dresses milling around and smoking and queuing outside the clubs. Valet parkers caring for their charges in their neatly jam-packed lots. Young men, faces illuminated by their iPhones as they lope along the streets.

This morning I wake at 4am and see the streets still busy. I would say that it is a city which never sleeps but at 8 am on a Sunday morning it has tired its mighty self out. Nothing is moving.

We’ve had six magical days here at the dear old Hampton Inn & Suites Downtown - a couple of blocks from the river and walkable to the Navy Pier, the art gallery…

I had booked a self-sufficiency suite here months ago and was thrilled to see it was spacious with three rooms on the most prominent corner of the hotel with fantastic street views. We unpack and settle in, then try to log into the WiFi. Disaster.

It simply does not work. We can get a sort of download if we stand in the corner by the door. Or if we go out into the hallway by the lift. But this is not how we want to live for six days in Chicago. We need to download papers. I need to blog. We are connectivity people. We call the desk and speak to Jeseca. She tries try to help. She connects us to AT&T. They run tests with me…time consuming and tedious tech stuff. Then they announce there is a problem and they don’t know when they can deal with it. Is there anything else they can do for me? Eh? Doh! No. Make the internet function. That is what I want. Sorry, we can’t do that today. We can’t say when…

The hotel is embarrassed. We have the best room the the place. Any room change is a downgrade. I don’t want to change rooms. I love our room. I’ve looked forward to it. We have planned things we want to cook for ourselves. We are missing culinary autonomy, our own food.

It’s getting late. Frustration is immense. Jeseca is passionately sympathetic but powerless. She gives us a voucher to go to a trendy hot dog place. We go.

It is a zany Chicago madhouse, like the Royal Show with people at windows shouting out numbers, hot dogs, burgers and pizzas being churned out by the score, mountains of chips, huge goblets of beer, donuts… Noise, movement, colour, queues. I order chili and salad. We share a beer. The food is average. The experience is fun.

The next morning I check with the desk’s Janeli to see if AT&T are coming to fix the WiFi. Surely a booster is all that is needed. The WiFi works down the straight lines of rooms. The problem is that it is not turning the corner to our corner suite.

Janeli confers with management. We go out. On our return hotel Jeneli reveals that the management has been unable to get any action from AT&T so all it can do is to offer us another room, a lesser room, of course. So we lose our magical suite and move onto the top floor at the back of the hotel to a perfectly nice small suite with a much less exciting view. We get a discount. The WiFi is fantastic.

It’s been a productive break in the trip.

It has been a time to rationalise luggage, to do washing, to swim and sun, to read and to see friends. It has been post-office time. Two boxes of our own overload to go home to Australia and a smaller one full of goodies for the grandchildren. We read and hear of the pressure under which the postal system is crumbling - and now we see it. Just two workers and a queue of people which stretches across the cavernous post office and out the door. It took about 90 minutes to get to the counter where the African-American worker is charming, competent, and utterly unruffled.

The city is teeming with tourists.

This hotel is swarming with them.

The river tour boats are jammed with them.

The city is at its best for them, in a glory of summer flowers and working overtime.

Walking to the pier we find the people-watching almost as fascinating as the skyline. Well, not quite. The Chicago skyline is stunning from every angle. Here on the pier we have tall ships and tour boats, a funfair, and a line of restaurants. We choose one and are given a rock star patio table in the shade. In this remarkable place we have unremarkable foods.

That evening we are reunited with our friends of Nashua days, Janet and Bruce Jenkins.

They lived in Massachusetts then, Bruce running the film school at Harvard and Janet editing art books for European publishers. Janet and I had met on IRC back in the day. In fact we had shared the horror of 9/11 together online. We had enjoyed a number of meals together in New England, particularly at an Afghan restaurant in Cambridge. Now Bruce is Prof of film, video and new media at the School of Art Institute of Chicago. We are able to

walk to their place on the other side of the river. It is a pleasant walk. Their condo is magnificently located and a very secure, roomy and pleasant place. Janet makes us Brazilian drinks incongruously in honour of the Olympics and we catch up on the years in a torrent of conversation.Then we walk to a nearby restaurant run by a South African sommelier. The wines selection is bedazzling. The food is very nice. The company is joyful. We talk and talk and talk. We talk our way back to their condo. We talk to the car and, as Bruce takes us on a wonderful night tour of Chicago, we talk and talk some more. We part warmly - with Bruce offering to meet us at the Art Institute gallery the next day and have us admitted as his guests.

This we do, taking our time to walk the park and watch the children sporting in the imaginative city water features. There are two brick towers from which water cascades and on which huge faces appear in gentle and passive expressions until, suddenly, a big jet of water emerges from the mouth. Children wait in a thrill of expectation beneath these faces, squealing and leaping when the water jets appear. We are enchanted and watch for some time, noting with pleasure the encompassing racial mix of the children sharing the water.

Bruce greets us on the Institute steps and escorts us through, giving us directions for the best way to see the most.

He goes back to work and we repair to the cafe for lunch which is chosen from a series of counters - sandwich, hot specials, pizza, grill… I can’t resist red cabbage and yellow squash with salmon. Bruce picks pizza. We sort out the queues and payments and make our way into the courtyard where we sit under a sunshade and watch the water fountain and the proud Gallery matrons socialising in their gladrags.

The food is divine.

And so, of course, is the gallery. Some of the great art of the world. We revel. We swoon. We sigh. We smile. We ponder. We walk through whole periods, fauves and monotonists, surrealists and landscapists - from de Chirico to Renoir and so many Picassos that one began to

yawn (not).

The gallery is busy but not too busy. We can move about and enjoy everything. We do this until our feet are aching. We stop and find another cafe and have a macchiato. Then we get going and do more.

By the time we have walked back to our hotel, our pedometers tell us we have covered 11 km and climbed 22 flights of stairs.

We treat ourselves to a date at Ruth’s Chris Steak House for dinner. This chain specialises in the best steaks in the country. It is a very rich and indulgent dinner.

I try to get in some serious pool exercises in the morning to make up for it. Bruce joins me to read in the sun for a while. The hotel has an excellent pool and a lovely adjacent sun patio in a canyon of high brick walls.

Then we go for a river walk, a city walk and a visit to Macys, which is immense. A grand department store of the classy old school which swarms with staff on the ground floor but is sparsely staffed on what seems like its hundreds of other floors. The place, which used to be Marshall Fields has a huge open atrium which is many floors high and topped by a handsome mosaic…so high up. One gets vertigo riding the escalator. Believe me.

The evening is reserved for my cherished former Tiser colleague Katie Spain and her English beau, Adam. The co-incidence of Katie and me being in Chicago at the same time absolutely needed a celebration. They meet us at the hotel and we decide to try Dirty Dick’s for dinner - because it is right on the river. We ask to be seated outside on the balcony over the river. It is hot and steamy, so much so that our appointed waiter complains bitterly about having to come out and serve us. Being rude to the patrons, it turns out, is a big part of the schtick at Dirty Dicks. While we talk and eat outside, all sorts of ghastly shenanigans are going on inside. People are all wearing big silly white hats with crude things written on them. No wonder the food is a bit on the average side. Oh well. The wine is good and the company terrific.

Friday is the big date. Val Bock, a fellow member of the Brainstorms community, has offered to host us on the famous Architecture River Tour of Chicago.

Val and I have not met before but we recognise each other instantly.

At Val’s suggestion, we take the teacher’s pet position in front of the Tour’s docent. Good thinking. It is very immediate and gives us a more intense awareness of the nuances of her focus. One has to be quick, though. This docent, one Claudia Winkler, has mountains to impart and she does so in machine-gun, rapid-fire delivery. She pauses only twice during the 90 minute tour, briefly, just to sip water, She does not seem to feel the heat.

She is absolutely engrossed in and expert in her subject. We are riveted and swivel-headed. The towering skyscrapers are magnificent, all the more so for the explanations of their whys and wherefores. They make me weep for Adelaide which has so sorely missed the boats in architectural aesthetic. It was once noted as a pretty city. Once, when it had colonial buildings and big, shady verandahs. But those who achieve control by shouting that history means “mothballs” have surrounded us with a city of brutal glass boxes. Dull, cheap, depressing. Architects, developers and town planners have de-spirited a whole community with their thuggish penny-pinching.

Everyone should come to Chicago to see how an urban jungle becomes an art work when developed as a project in integrated design. “Contextual” is the word that our docent used. New buildings are fastidiously designed to complement their neighbours, to reiterate the shapes and rules of the classics. Even the mighty Trump Tower respects these rules of context and aesthetic and is, in itself, one of the beauties of the skyline. Um…we won’t say anything about the huge “TRUMP” sign on the front. Trump is the Polites of Chicago. “Adaptive re-use” is the docent’s other catch-cry. Old warehouses are born again as apartments and condos through restoration, renovation and the addition of hanging balconies - which are one of the striking ubiquities of the city,

Val takes us for a bit of a walk after the river tour. Back to her place for a glass of iced tea. We really need it. It turns out to be a five-mile walk and the day is hot. But the route is wonderful, straight across the city all the way along Millennium Park and along Grant Park, past the mighty lines of foreshore buildings. I find a doll lying on the hot pavement. A very fresh, new doll. Some child must be bereft. The doll looks sad and lost, too. It's all a bit poignant. I put the doll where I hope she might be found. We forge forwards following Val. Val is a fit woman and does a lot of city walking.

A mile or so on, we pause momentarily to admire the scale of the lake. I ask a gentleman sitting alone and admiring the view if he would mind sharing his park bench with us. He is an elegant man and his accent is English. You’re a Brit, I tell him. And so a conversation begins which reveals that he has not only been to Adelaide but lived there as a professor of Theatre at Flinders University. John Green is his name, now chair of the School of Fine and Performing Arts aka Theatre at Columbia College, Chicago. He loves living here, even in the famously wicked winters.

Val’s condo has a spectacular view of the lake which is very busy with watercraft of all sizes. She points out a large carpark in the foreground of her view. Here, she says, Obama’s big black Marine 1 chopper lands whenever he comes to town. They close Lakeshore Drive, security is intense, and it takes all of four minutes to move the President from the chopper to his vehicle and whoosh, he is off to his Chicago home just down the way. He’s a Chicago boy, after all.

Taxied back to the hotel, we take it a bit easy on the pool patio. It is not always easy getting swims here thanks to the domination of children. I have yet to meet a parent who offers any consideration towards a grandmother trying to do exercises in a corner of the pool. Quite the opposite. They do their passive aggressive best to drive me out of the water so the kids have 100 per cent splash and dive space. My regard for American manners has nose-dived from the frequency of this phenomenon.

Strolling out in what we now feel is “our” bit of Chicago in the neighbourhood of River North, we choose a modern Mexican restaurant for dinner. We score another rock-star table for two on the sidewalk patio. A glass of interesting Spanish wine and a jicama salad. Oh, my, why don’t we have jicama in Australia? What a fresh and lovely vegetable with a lime and green mango treatment. A grilled redfish main with Mexican salsa and rice. Bruce’s haddock gets the thumbs-up, too. Healthy and divine. We swan off into the night and sabotage it all with a tub of Ben & Jerry’s.

Our last Chicago day has been one of just relishing the city. We have meandered the streets and leant on bridge rails gazing and watching with that glorious sense that the clock is not watching us. We have strolled the riverwalk and sat among the tourists and locals, listening to the live music in the riverside wine bar and watching the world go by. Studying the details of the buildings. Soaking it in. Soaking it in.

We have loved it here.

Chicago, you’re our kinda town!