The trip to Pennsylvania was going to be last September. I bought airplane tickets, made reservations for hotels and a rental car. The plan was to visit Pittsburgh and Erie on my way home from Europe to Colorado. I was flying over this area anyway. Why not to have a few days’ stopover and see this part of the US? However, Man proposes, but God disposes.
Several hours before I left Bulgaria for America, I tore a hip flexor muscle. I really did nothing to deserve that, just squatted once, perhaps too hard and fast, and heard a sound of something ripping. To those who never ripped a muscle, my advice is not to do it, ever – the pain was awful. Without going into details of what happened next, I only mention here that I had to make immediate changes to my trip, to fly home instead of Pittsburgh and seek urgent medical help. The muscle healed in 2 months and in December, I went to Australia and New Zealand.
Nevertheless, the idea to go to Pennsylvania stuck in my mind. This puzzled my husband.
‘Did you forget something there?’ he kept asking me sarcastically.
One night, my husband said that he checked the airfare from Denver to Abu Dhabi where we going to soon and already bought tickets, just to make sure that our tickets were the best value for money. He also joked if I wanted to see how much it cost to fly to Pittsburgh since I was so determined to go there. Without getting up, I picked up my phone and opened the United Airlines application. The flights to Pittsburgh were cheap and convenient.
Five minutes and a few clicks later, the ticket was purchased. My husband’s jaw dropped. ‘Cancel the ticket,’ he said. ‘I was just kidding.’
‘It’s all your fault,’ I replied. ‘I am not cancelling.’
Closer to the departure day, I was on pins and needles worrying that something would happen again as it did last September. Fate did not let me go to Pittsburgh then for some reason. Did it mean that I should not travel to Pittsburgh at all or was I not allowed to do that last year only? I decided to ignore superstition and to fly. Running ahead of the story, I can say that everything went really well.
In Pittsburgh, I rented an apartment not far from Carnegie Museum. I found it on Booking’s mobile app which turned out to be cheaper than the Booking website on the computer or Airbnb and hotels. The apartment was a mini-studio in a very old building. One wall of the studio was all closets that hid a queen-size built-in bed, a refrigerator, a tiny kitchenette, draws and a wardrobe. The other walls were unplastered bricks. The bathroom was in a small niche. The ceiling was about 15’ high. A good number of pipes and cables snaked under it in all directions. The whole setting looked cozy and ugly, and amusing at the same time.
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