I haven’t played much poker out on the east coast with the exception of a few days in Philadelphia and a week in Boston, but there’s a whole bunch of smaller rooms in Connecticut, Rhode Island, Massachusetts and New Hampshire that I thought would be interesting to check out. In fact I’ve never stepped foot outside of a big city (Philly, NYC, Boston) in that whole upper east coast region, so it was a bit exciting to me to still have essentially an entire region of the US that I’ve never really seen or explored. Well that’s not totally true, we went up to Maine on a family trip 25+ years ago, but the memory is a bit hazy.
As someone who is not a planner, I made almost zero plans for this trip. I booked my first two nights in Pittsburgh and started driving. I-80 from Chicago to Pittsburgh is not the most exciting stretch of highway, so I made no stops until late afternoon once I crossed the border from Ohio into Pennsylvania. Although I do kind of regret not stopping in Cuyahoga Valley National Park outside of Cleveland (which I’d never even heard of) but all the colors of the trees looked great when driving past it, and the reviews I read after driving past it were very positive!
I stopped at some small state park maybe 15 minutes off the highway, northwest of Pittsburgh, to get in a quick hike and admire the fall colors. It wasn’t anything overly memorable, and my hike had no real views of anything, but you can’t ask for too much when you just start googling “State Parks Near Me” when you’re on the highway. It was fine though, always nice to get off the highway for a bit, and basically everywhere looks some degree of ‘nice’ when it’s mid October in Pennsylvania.
The room I booked was a bit odd, it was through a private host on Booking.com, it’s labeled as a hotel, but it’s actually a big old house where the owner rents out the rooms individually and the common room, kitchen, and bathroom are all shared. So basically the same as an Airbnb shared house. It was in a quiet neighborhood, big trees everywhere, plenty of room to park on the street, the house was definitely showing it’s age a bit, but with a certain about of rustic charm. And the best part was I was the only person there, so I had it all to myself for less than half of what a hotel would have cost. The owner let me in, showed me around, gave me some food recs, gave me the room key, and I was on my way to the casino. But first stop was the famous Primanti Bros for a sandwich. I got the capicola (aka the gabagool) with egg, which was a tasty, pretty unique sandwich with the french fries and coleslaw, BUT the meat to coleslaw ratio was just too slaw-y, so I can’t give 5 stars.
The poker action was at the Rivers Casino, same company that owns the one in Chicago and a few other places. It’s not nearly as crowded as Chicago (well almost nowhere is) and the highest stake game is $1/3 blinds with a $500 max buy in. Around midnight some guys who had been drinking sat down and the table got really good, people running up $2,000+ stacks, the type of game you can’t leave. And I didn’t. I played till 6am, finished down a few hundred dollars, couldn’t hit any hands in any big spots. Story of my year. Screwed up my daytime tourist plans to boot. Yay.
The next day I woke up for late lunch at a nearby neighborhood café, and then had to choose between the botanical gardens or the Warhol museum, the Warhol museum is more unique to Pittsburgh, so that was the winner. I liked the museum, there was definitely a lot more to Andy’s career than the soup cans, like decades more, haha. That closed at 5, which gave a me a bit of time to walk across the bridge, see the downtown, and get to The Point for sunset. A nice little afternoon. I certainly wouldn’t have minded a bit more time in Pittsburgh. As for the poker I got stuck a bunch of money and then grinded my way to get back even. So not the greatest start. Onto Philadelphia.
I figured I’d get off the highway for most of this one and see some of the central Pennsylvania hill country, less affectionately known to some as ‘Pennsyltucky.’ I picked a turnoff that would take me to a section of the Ghost Town Trail, which is called that because I guess there’s some abandoned mining towns along the trail, although whatever sectioned I picked didn’t seem to have any, hmm. I really should do a bit better research beforehand. The colors were nice of course.
I also drove around some of the small towns, and if you’re trying to get the vibe of small town America leading up to the election, jeeez-us, these places are insane. It’s like each house is trying to out-do each other with how big of a Trump sign they can put in their yard, or on the side of their house, garage, whatever. A giant cardboard effigy, sure, why not. It’s legitimately scary how much these people love Trump. The locals are friendly though, or chatty at least. I stopped in a sub shop and in the time it took to make a hot roast beef I learned all about the owner’s employee, who is fresh out of prison, for apparently killing a pedophile, and now he’s like 20 years behind on modern technology and hates texting. Alrighty then. Back on the road for most of the afternoon with a sunset stop in a state park somewhere a bit outside of Philadelphia. This was a worthwhile stop.
I booked some motel for two nights near the Parx casino, which is in Bethlehem PA, maybe 40 minutes east of downtown. Like most US casinos, its not located in the most exciting of places. But Parx is the largest poker room in the northeast, if you’re not counting DC, and a damn good place to play. I’d also have one afternoon to bum around Philly, which is pleasant enough. My museum of choice was called the Mütter Museum, which has a bunch old medical equipment, wax models, but the main thing is the well preserved anatomical specimens, skeletons and organs and stuff stored in liquid in jars, most of which were from rare conditions resulting in morbidity of the patient. Definitely a creepy place!
From there I mostly just wandered around the city, making sure to get to the old parts of town where there’s narrow cobblestone alleys and nicely restored buildings and homes that probably cost a gajillion dollars even though they’re really small. And a Philly cheesesteak for dinner of course. Although I didn’t make it down to south Philly, which I guess is where the old school, famous cheesecake places are at. Next time. Next state up: Connecticut.
