Remembering my wanderings – Part 3 of ?

I made a mistake in my blog when I told you our departure date. It was Friday the 8th of July, not Sunday.



If you have been reading my blog, you know what happened next at the Buttercup Woodlands Campground near Butler. The storm that would eventually cost the camp ground over two million in damages. Here is link to my old blog: http://dizzydick.blogspot.com/2011/07/wondering-how-bad-was-it.html


Here is a link to a news video of the day after. I checked it and it is still an active link:


http://www.wpxi.com/video/28591341/index.html?taf=burg


Where I live here in Texas, it is flat. The towns are flat and the cities are flat, only the freeways going up over each other give the feeling of hills. Pennsylvania is not flat and neither are the towns. I grew up about 8 miles or so south of Butler, PA, which was the closest town. We didn’t get too many pictures of the town, but let me give you a tour of it with what we got. Let us start on Main Street:

And the

Butler County Court

House:

Going up the hill on our way to visit my wife’s brother.  This picture does not do the hill justice.  It is a lot steeper than it looks.

I think this picture will give you some idea of the hill and a good view of the houses perched on the side of it.

This picture was taken on our return to the campground.  Little did we know that this little sprinkle of rain had turned the campground upside down.  (Well almost, anyway.)  This is near the top of the hill starting down, and yes, there are lots of curves.

This picture was taken a little farther down the hill.

To get out of Butler, you almost have to go up a hill.  There is only one major road out of town that doesn’t go up a hill and that is Route 8 south to Pittsburgh, but a few miles out of town it does goes up a big hill.  This picture is going down the hill opposite the other hill in the pictures above.  At the bottom you can either go into town or cross the viaduct to route 8.

This is what you see if you come from route 8 and cross the viaduct I was just talking about.  The old four story grey stone office building (about the center of the picture) is about all that is left of the Pullman-Standard plant.  My office was in that building.  The car manufacturing plant that was there was the second largest building under one roof in the USA at that time.  At least that is what we were told.  It was huge and losing it, the country lost a lot of jobs and a lot of manufacturing power.  When we were in full production, we kept three to four steel mills busy just supplying us with the raw steel.

I could go on and on, but I think this is enough for one day.

You all have a good day now, you hear?