I recently watched the 6-part biopic on the artist Andy Warhol on Netflix. It reminded me of a trip to Pittsburgh. He grew up there, but he lived most of his life in New York. His museum is in the West End in Pittsburgh close to the sports arenas and other museums. The city hosts five professional sports teams.

Of course, Pittsburgh was built on steel. But the furnaces are gone now, and they are replaced with arts and entertainment venues. At one time the area had more than 300 steel-related businesses and 446 bridges. The downtown sits at the confluence of the Allegheny and Monongahela Rivers that form the Ohio River, and the rivers still carry a large volume of barge traffic. Between 1970 and 1990 the population dwindled in half, but then it stabilized as health care, education, and technology companies moved it.

Key West is no longer the quaint little town that it was for most of the 19th & 20th Centuries. Although it still contains the Naval Air Station, the submarine base was moved so the community is dependent primarily upon tourism. It is located at the southernmost point of the US at the end of a long string of islands. It first was connected by a rail line, a highway, and then by Pan American Airlines that was formed here. It had a reputation as an arts colony of writers and artists and a welcoming community for the LGBTQ+ folks.

The tourist trade got a major increase with the construction of two piers capable of handling the new super cruise ships that would dump 10,000 people a day on the short Duval St. Recently, the town has limited the size of the cruise ships that will be allowed to dock to try to relieve some of the overcrowding.

Several years ago, we flew into Philadelphia in February to see the annual flower show in the convention center. It extended over three blocks with 2nd story crossovers of the streets. It is the nation's largest and longest-running horticultural event. In 2021 it was moved outdoors in June, and it is again scheduled to be outdoors this year because of the continuing pandemic. We were greeted with a flurry of snow, but the weather cleared the next day.

We had toured Independence Hall and some of the historical sites on previous tours so on this trip we limited ourselves to three art museums and some of the downtown buildings. Not that many of the 18th Century buildings remain in the Central City from the period in which Philadelphia was the largest city in the Colonies.