Ellwood City, PA

Hi y'all,

From the megatropolis of New York to the more modest Ellwood City. Don't let the name fool you, it's a pretty small town somewhere in Western Pensylvania. Real America.

We are staying with The Ruckerts, Betta's host family from when she did a high school year here 9 years ago, and are being treated like royalty. In fact Betta and I feel like travelling phoneys at the moment. Going from a cool Brooklyn apartment to beautiful large suburban house with swimming pool is hardly slumming it!

We arrived here on Tuesday, getting a ride with Cassie all the way from New York. The journey was 7 hours but not that bad. US radio kept us rocking along. We stopped off at Penn State uni to drop off Samantha and have a pit stop. The campus there is unreal. It's a university town, literally, with 45,000 students living there on campus during term time, and the facilities are pretty astounding. Prime examples being the footie stadium (capacity 113,000) and the small nuclear reactor they have there for research!!! The Mad Mex restaurant was pretty awesome too.



Since we've been in Ellwood we've really entered holiday mode. Reading, relaxing, swimming and so on. There is a little heat wave here at the moment so it's almost 30 degrees and sunny which is very welcome.

We're getting stuck into the American way of life...we went to an Amusement Park today, my first time in about 20 years but it was good fun. I did feel like I was in the Simpsons though...it felt like a very American day trip, but none the worse for that. Unless you partake in the deep fried Oreos (similar to bourbon biscuits) or waffles. We didn't. Next up on the agenda we have Bowling in an old style place, a Baseball game and a visit to Pittsburgh for a bit of culture. We're also keeping it very real with the food too. Burgers, Pizza and ice cream to name but a few. When in Rome, eh?!


We're here for another week yet and are really enjoying doing nothing.

M&B