Dec. 15 to Dec. 31, 1998 by Joan

Pittsburgh was great. I lived there in the early 1990s and never really liked coming home to it until I met Eric, whose family lives there.

When we arrived, we dropped our bags in the "Eric Lyness memorial room," as Eric's siblings call it, since he had never managed to move all his crap out after he left home for college. The room was full of boxes of stuff we had shipped home to ourselves from the trip, and boxes of clothes. We ripped right into the clothes boxes and found some jeans and T-shirts and sweaters.

It was like getting all new clothes, after wearing the same two outfits for 18 months. Literally. During our visit home, we saw a video of the Quetico canoe trip (that was the start of our whole world trip) from May 1997. And in the video, Eric and I were wearing exactly the same clothes we were wearing when we watched the video 18 months later.

Eric's mom and dad were keen to take us out to dinner but we really hungry for home cooking. So we had a chicken casserole at home. We ended up spending the next three weeks hunkered down almost entirely in Pittsburgh, just hanging out with Eric's parents. I think we only ate out twice the whole time we were there. The first week, we saw Eric's dad sing in three Christmas concerts and took walks in the woods almost every day.

It was nice change from our usual visits home, where we spend a night or two at home, and the next five or seven days trying to cram in everyone we know in the area.

Of course, the downside is, we didn't get to see most of our friends in Pittsburgh. We will see everyone next time. Eric said he didn't want to try to fit in everyone partly because it was too emotional making sudden, fleeting contact with everyone, knowing that we would soon leave again and not see them for at least another six months.

While we were home we made it out to Eric's Aunt Helen's to see a whole bunch of relatives. Mostly we just picked up where we left off. But two cousins had really changed: Tamara and Trisha. When we left, Tamara and Trisha were little girls. Now, just 18 months later, Tamara had a boyfriend and had just worn a slinky dinner dress to a party at a country club. We could not get over how much older she and Trisha seemed. Plus they were both wild for those old 1970s styles, and even had their mom rooting through her closet for clothes from back then. Blew us away.

Back in Pittsburgh, close to Christmas, Eric's brother Bob drove up, and then his sister Janet and her boyfriend John. We all had a great time walking around in the woods and eating Eric's mom's apple pies, pumpkin pies and cookies.

Janet presented the family with an odd gift she had just received as a gift from a friend: a clay dachshund that holds little cups from its nipples, which are rather long and stand up from its back. It was quite strange. Janet had intended to leave it at the family abode, but was later convinced that this would be too cruel.

Eric's other sister, our fearsome web mistress Katy, couldn't make it to Pittsburgh this year. So on Christmas day, we set up a video camera, hung a stocking on it, and then talked to it as if it were Katy. It wasn't the same, but hey, we tried.

We made sure to film everyone as they opened gifts from Katy, most notably the calendars where Katy makes fun of all of us by cutting and pasting our faces onto the bodies of movie stars and other famous folk. Some of the best pictures from the calendar this year showed Eric's cousin Ted as Indiana Jones, and a whole slew of relatives as the Mickey Mouse Club. Another great month shows the Spice Girls, and in this one, Katy pasted her own face onto the most coveted body.

Parents: have hope. After Christmas, 16 years after moving out of the house, Eric finally cleaned all of the crap out of his old bedroom. To be fair to Eric, not all of the remains were his, but let's be honest, most were.

With help from Bob, Eric and I savagely attacked the closet, under the bed, and all the drawers. We divided everything into three piles: Keep, Give Away, Pitch.

I'll spare you all the details, but the items we found included: a Jedi-cloak, hand-sewn by Eric's sister Katy (our fearsome Web mistress) years earlier (Keep); several pairs of Eric's glasses from when he was about age six (I wanted to Pitch them but he insisted that we Keep one); Bob's Bicentennial collection of cereal box freebies (I don't remember the fate of these); Bob's flashlight labeled "Number 7" (Keep); all of Eric's work files from the early 1990s (Pitch); several years of Eric's Scientific Americans (Pitch); the family's Thingmaker, a set of molds and a cooker to make various plastic doodads (we wanted to Give it but Bob intervened, so it became a Keep), etc. etc.

Most heart-breaking of all was Eric's discovery of his childhood stuffed toy friends, Weaver the Beaver, Me-Mouse and Me-Bear. I have to admit, I was kind of moved by way Eric described how Weaver-the-Beaver came into his life: on his third or fourth birthday, a huge package arrived in the mail, addressed to Eric himself, from his grandma, and Weaver the Beaver was inside. Bob thinks, and we all agree, that Weaver the Beaver is actually an armadillo, but no matter, the name stuck.

They were cute to look at, so Eric put them in the Keep pile. But as the days passed, he got a closer look at how much they had disintegrated. Repeated dunkings in Eric's childhood baths had removed most of the fuzz from Me-Bear, plus Me-Bear's stuffing had lost its fluff and a hole in his neck made him look like a tracheotomy patient. So Eric relented, and put them in the Pitch pile.

But we made it special. We put all three of them together in a nice little white plastic bag. And we got a good photo of them before they left.

In the end, we threw away at least a dozen bags of trash and delivered a trunk-load of goods to the Salvation Army.

We celebrated New Year's with Eric's parents and Bob, at First Night in downtown Pittsburgh. In just a few hours we saw a symphony, the Blind Boys from Alabama gospel singers, some tap dancers, some film shorts, and best of all, we got to Swing Dance to a big band in the Westin William Penn hotel.

Then we all rushed home to a party at Eric's friends Steve and Betsy's house and found ... no one home. It's a long story but the Steve and Betsy and their kids made it back home just before midnight, so we got to throw back some champagne with them to ring in the New Year.

next: Grand River, Washington DC, and New York

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