As I’ve mentioned in my previous post, I took a road trip to Pittsburgh for the holiday. This post documents the last day and a quarter that I spent there.

On the 4th of July, we awoke around late-morning/early afternoon and got ready for the riveting fun of the day. Cj, the baby, was a little cranky. I attributed it to the new area, but his mood lasted the majority of the rest of the day.

We met up with another resident tour guide that was a relative of one of the group members. She took us to The Strip which was a large strip mall area full of a wide variety of items. It goes from souvenirs, dresses, chocolate and coffee, bar & restaurant type food, and a farmers market.

It was hotter than the inside of an oven out there, so I had to stop and get some mango Italian ice. The vendor was kind enough to pose for a pictures. If you ever see this man in Pittsburgh selling Italian ice, it would behoove you to get some because it is simply divine.

After that we dropped by another mall before heading back to the hotel for hour to relax. We knew we would be out for quite a bit of time because of the fireworks.

Let me just say that we should have just went there straight from the mall. When we headed up there is was completely packed and we were hard pressed to find a parking space. After finding something suitable and quite a bit of complaining we arrived at the top of Mt. Washington.

There was an amazing energy on top of that mountain. It was alive and exciting. People were singing, selling food, laughing and talking. It was a great place to take street photos. The view of the fireworks was perfect. It was definitely one of my favorite firework shows of all time.

After that was over, we spent over an hour in traffic getting back downtown. We stopped off in this gathering area where there were people performing and hanging out well past midnight. That was where I really got a feel of the artistic culture of the city. There’s a lot of young people that I would say is because of the close vicinity of all the colleges.  It was alive and loads of fun. There were street performers that actually jumped over a group of women. It was interesting to say the least.

Anyway, here are some other photos from the last day of my trip. Enjoy.

Later,