The rains of Ernesto finally subsided and today has been pretty nice. I'm up in Jefferson Hills, PA helping Jess get all settled in to her new place. After church this morning, the plan was to go mountain/cross biking some in Pittsburgh. Well, after a long nap, we finally got our act together and loaded up the car.

After a decently long drive into the city on the Blue Belt, we made our way to Frick Park. I found the playground off of Beechwood Ave., that I read about, but there wasn't any good parking other than the street, so we kept driving until we found a small parking area at the base of a huge hill. It was at the enterance to the "Fire Trail" so we upacked the bikes and started cranking.

The trails of Frick Park are a lot of fun. We didn't do really any of the singletrack that I'd read about, but instead explored the park on the double wide gravel paths. We rode up to Cowboy Hill and the Bowling Green, the Northernmost sections of the park. We explored a bit more around there before checking out a map and realizing we needed to head West to get to the bulk of the park. We rode along Beechwood to the playground and the across the wide open fields.

It was just getting dark as we were discovering more interesting trails, so we had to hightail it back to the car. Neither Jess nor I had previously gone as fast offroad as we did descending back the car. The 'cross bike was absolutely perfect for these trails and I'm looking forward to exploring some of the singletrack next time we come back. It's a shame that the six months Jess will sepnd here that most of it will probably see this park covered in snow. I worked on a few starts and remounts before calling it a day.

So far, I have to say that as a city, I really like Pittsburgh. The downtown is pretty cool with all the rivers and bridges and it seems like its got some intersting things to do. We drove through Squirrel Hill I believe it was as well as a few other neighborhoods and I had to pick my jaw off the floor after seeing a few of the mansions along the way. It's easy to see that there was once quite a bit of money around these parts. There must be some here still.