Finding out about an upcoming conference in southwest Pennsylvania, it was without question that I was going to meander about afterwards, plus tack on a week of working from home in Southwestern Ontario.

Not wanting to bring my computer and bike to the conference, I flew to Windsor and dropped my stuff off first, then headed to the Greyhound station in Detroit a few days later for a 5-hour bus ride.

I thought everything was going to go sideways as all my coworkers simply flew to Pittsburgh, while I sat in the Detroit Greyhound terminal at 7 in the morning and they announced my bus was simply cancelled.

Except in my 20 minutes of indecision about renting a car or flying just to get to Pittsburgh somehow, they suddenly announced for everyone to line up that was headed to Cleveland and points onward.

It was a good thing I didn't leave for the AVIS.

Before I knew it, I was breathing in every last gasp of Toledo as we stopped there for 5 minutes and I fought off my early morning slumber. Another two hours and I'd be in Cleveland, with the bus for Pittsburgh leaving almost immediately because of the delay back in Detroit.

Stopping in Youngstown along the way, I noticed that gentrification had finally come to the downtrodden steel town as the $0.75 cent lot I photographed back in 2007 was now over double the price.

Following Youngstown, and for the rest of the hour bus ride to Pittsburgh, a talkative man changed seats and commanded conversation about travel and Canada. He was a bit strange, but arriving in Pittsburgh, I didn't have the heart to not give him my number. Thankfully I don't think he had the greatest grasp on cell phones and I would never end up hearing from him.

Getting off the bus and quickly moving away from the Greyhound terminal, I didn't have much time to enjoy the adopted home of Evgeni Malkin, as I had to grab a city bus and head out to the airport to meet my colleagues who would be landing within the hour.

Our conference was right down in southwestern Pennsylvania at a lakeside camp, all of 15 minutes away from West Virginia. It was also within walking distance of Pennsylvania's highpoint Mt. Davis, which amused and frustrated me after getting Clarkson to detour for this peak on a previous baseball trip.

With this also being the conference where I met that guy who discredited a bunch of my highpoints since I didn't make a day's hiking trip out of them, I listened during the first night's social how my previous trip to Mt. Davis didn't count, and then I simply hiked the 5 or 6km from the camp to the highpoint the next day.

Take that, random guy from Virginia!

These socials were also a problem because they were BYOB, and while I didn't get inexplicably hammered, I did overly celebrate with a Tiger Woods fist pump when a group of us were talking about our birth years and I beat this random attendee by a year.

So now this is one of those things where the moment pops in my head on random Tuesdays and derails my mood because of self embarrassment. Good times.

On Thursday afternoon there were scheduled field trips, and of the four different choices, I obviously went with the popular trip to the Fallingwater house.

Fallingwater was designed in 1935 by Frank Lloyd Wright. Wright, who has been recognized by the American Institute of Architects as the greatest American architect of all time, was a prolific architect who designed more than a 1000 structures in his 70 professional years (400 of which were built). His style featured what he called "organic architecture", which meant that his buildings were at harmony with the surrounding environment.

Fallingwater was built for Edgar J. and Liliane Kauffman, owners of the Kauffman Department Store of Pittsburgh. Their son, Edgar Jr., had read Frank Lloyd Wright's An Autobiography and then travelled to Wisconsin to meet the architect and begin an architectural apprenticeship.

The Kauffman's meanwhile, continued to live in their French Norman estate in Pittsburgh and occasionally head out to these Laurel Highlands when they needed to get away from the city. Their cabin out here was getting rundown though & that's when they contacted Wright about a replacement.

Wright would build the house right up on a prominent rock where the Kauffman's used to picnic, even going so far as to leave the rock exposed in the living room. He also built large, flat cantilevered levels, which followed his organic architecture by being flat like the stone terraces of a stream; while also providing the increased space that the Kauffman's requested for guests and their adult son.

All of these materials came from the nearby woods or an old quarry to the west that was reopened to construct this masterpiece. Wright kept the walls and stairs painted with a light ochre, painted the steel with his often-used Cherokee Red, and left the exposed stone - all of these coming together to gently blend into the Pennsylvania hills.

There were other touches inside the house like the glass windows not being fitted into metal supports, but rather into recesses in the stonework so that when you're inside, it feels more harmonious with nature. There's also a staircase down to the stream, as well as a channel in the area between the house and the servants quarter, where a natural spring feeds water into this area and then back out again.

If you're wondering why I don't have any interior pictures, especially of the intricate details or fun facts, it's because they don't let you take pictures inside. This is in the hopes that you join one of the other 160,000 people who come here annually.

Regardless, I would certainly recommend this tour if you're in the area.

Anyway, Friday would come and there was no way I was going to fly straight home like my direct work colleagues. Instead, I left in the wee hours of the morning like they did, but instead of catching their 10:30 flight, I took the 10:30 city bus into Pittsburgh, ate some lunch at a mediocre salad spot, then made my way back over to the Greyhound station.

This is because even though I tried to catch a ride with some of my Pennsylvania colleagues across The Keystone State, they were either not going far enough, or had other plans. I was left paying $41 for the 3 hour ride about 2/3rds of the way across Pennsylvania, to the capital of Harrisburg.

I don't remember a thing about the Pittsburgh->Harrisburg bus ride, but stepping out of Harrisburg's fine train station, I immediately liked this city as I found lots of cement, a decrepit underpass and some seedy bars in the shadow of the train station.

While I want to see every notable American city from Savannah to Tacoma, I have to admit part of the reason I was spending the afternoon in Harrisburg was because it's simply where I had to catch my next bus.

What I found though was a pleasant surprise, with a mix of grit, rowhouses and old buildings; all glued together with a feeling slightly like Baltimore, and a lot like Philadelphia. Suddenly I wanted to move up Altoona, York and Reading on the places to visit list.

Harrisburg has a AAA baseball team and I couldn't help but think of when Clarkson and I finish off the last handful of major league stadiums & we need to start visiting the Louisville's, El Paso's and Harrisburg's of the next highest baseball league.

Except Clarkson would later tell me that his plan is to revisit the major league parks whenever we finish visiting all 30. Leaving me to wonder how he can resist having drinks on the above street in Harrisburg and staying at whatever hotel is on offer.

Pretty decent biking spot. Strangely couldn't remember it from any videos though.

Continuing to roam around downtown, I wanted to go visit the Italian Renaissance capitol building, but I also was wearing my 70L backpack and thought better of even trying to enter the grounds.

Instead I cut through some gross urban mini-mall named Strawberry Square, mostly because I needed to use a washroom at this point.

This was right across from the capitol.

Lo and behold, the developers of Strawberry Square actually preserved 10 storefronts on the National Register of Historic Places, when building the atrium connecting all of their retail space.

Strangely I can't find any pictures of these original buildings before they were enclosed by the Strawberry Square development. Only that Strawberry Square is also located atop the lot where the YWCA building and the Penn-Harris Hotel were demolished, just a few years prior to the 1978 start of this complex.

Following Strawberry Square, I was growing tired of carrying around my backpack and I still had more walking to do today. So I headed back to the bus stop near the train station and waited until my local bus eventually came.

Heading out on that local bus, we went through a part of Harrisburg that looked a little rough and in line with some of the characters I saw milling about by the train station. Turns out this is Allison Hill, which seems to be the one neighbourhood that Wikitravel and random Reddit commenters say to avoid in Harrisburg.

Of course I was judging a place solely based on grassy, vacant lots and a few abandoned buildings, while it does sound like an interesting, relatively safe neighbourhood in other online articles.

Anyway, that was enough Harrisburg for now.

Continue to Part 2...