Adventures in Pennsylvania: Angels, Bellefonte, knitting and laundry

On Monday night we watched Penn State's production of Angels in America Part 1: Millennium Approaches (well, the dress rehearsal). It was a remarkably ambitious production for a college to put on. While I obviously have some opinions on the depiction and accuracy of characters described as Mormons in this play, I think I'd be hard-pressed to write a play with, for example, Muslim characters without doing a whole lot of research and frequent fact-checking with people who are actually practicing Muslims. In any case, the play doesn't concern itself with specific religious beliefs as much as it is a meditation on human integrity and hypocrisy. (If you have any kind of belief or set of beliefs, you're probably going to act at least once against them. That's human nature. From there it's a question of whether you'll persist in selectively applying your beliefs, return to doing what you believe is right, or pick a new set of beliefs altogether.)

Tuesday was laundry day. If I'm going to be on a trip for more than three days, I'll do laundry so I don't have to carry dirty clothes home in my suitcase. (Besides, I have a moniker to uphold!) I picked up a tiny bottle of Gain at the Dollar Tree, took about an hour and a half chillin' & sudsin' at a local laundromat and spent most of the rest of the day decompressing, as you do. Especially when you're out of your typical comfort zone.

Nittany Lion image by Eric Firestine, Penn State Daily Collegian

On a tangentially-related note, it seems like everything in State College is named after the Nittany Lion, the Penn State mascot. If I opened a yarn store here I'd be legally obliged to name it Knittany.

On Wednesday, I took the advice of one of the Penn State theater professors and visited Bellefonte, a little Victorian town about 10 miles away from State College. It's wonderfully picturesque: built on a steep hill with a river winding through the bottom of the town, an old brick match factory, a historic railroad that offers fall foliage rides, lots of Victorian "painted lady" houses and storefronts, a county courthouse with a copper dome, maybe a dozen old churches, some gorgeous bed-and-breakfast houses -- and at the very top of the hill, behind the courthouse, there's an old Union cemetery overlooking the town and surrounding hills. It really looks like something out of a movie.

Bellefonte train station image courtesy of Bellefonte Cultural and Historical Association

I also stopped by Giant, and serendipitously witnessed Marty, their loss-prevention robot, at work. The googly eyes on this guy turned what could easily have been a tall, somewhat intimidating robot with an Evil Empire vibe into something a little bit more whimsical.

Today (Thursday) brought with it snow flurries, wind and general weather cruddiness. This meant that even if we'd wanted to engage in some outside adventures, the elements were not with us. As a result, we mostly just packed up, ran last-minute errands, drove around for a while, and eventually got bored and headed for the airport.

The State College Airport is teensy. We're talking Fisher-Price Airport size. They have, I think, a total of 3 gates and a single restaurant/souvenir shop, plus bathrooms and a car rental area. When there aren't any flights scheduled to depart for a while, they just shut down the entire TSA security checkpoint and take a coffee break. We took a teeny airplane from State College to Chicago O'Hare -- which is sort of the opposite experience, a humongous international airport with multiple terminals -- and managed to catch our next flight back to Seattle just in time.

And now we're home again, home again, jiggity-jog. I'm going to sleep like a piece of lead.