Greensburg, PA

Greensburg: current home to several friends. Past home of a few more. Reason enough for a visit for us!

There were not many options for RV overnighting in the Greensburg area from late October into early November. We found ourselves hunkered down at a KOA 20 minutes outside of the bumbling city of Greensburg. A KOA with an amazing (and still inflated!) jumping pillow, but scant running opportunities if you didn’t want to possibly die by car or truck speeding down a narrow road.

We found ourselves driving out to meet the various rail trails that do the area: the Five Star trail in Greensburg, the Coal & Coke trail in Mt Pleasant, and the Great Allegheny passage via Newton. The whole driving to-and-from these trails shortened our run lengths, but overall, each trail was nice and worth the drive.

Two tips for running on the Great Allegheny passage through the Newton area:

• Carry a stick in case of roaming goose gangs. Those suckers get nasty quick!
• Avoid the bakery next to Gary’s Chuckwagon. Their donuts taste like leftover flood smell.

While in the Greensburg area we spent time with our friend Ricky and our friend Shane. Ricky introduced me to the delight which is the White Rabbit Cafe (I returned solo one day after a coffee date meet-up to work from the location). Shane reinforced the glory that is the bread rolls at the Texas Roadhouse and supplied Jake with enough meat and fish from his hunting and fishing exploits to last through the winter.

Our first weekend in Greensburg was spent in the D.C. area for my friend (a G!) Abby’s wedding. It was a lovely weekend and only a 3.5-hour drive from Greensburg. Living in an RV for the past 6+ years has somehow hoodwinked my brain into associating a 3.5-hour drive with the words ‘short’ and ‘feasible’.

As is typical, we spent our weekdays in Greensburg working. We popped out for Pittsburgh-style sandwiches (I am okay with them, but Jake rates them highly. We were also tipped off to the existence of pierogi pizza (thank you Cam & Liss!). Pierogi pizza is a spectacular form of pizza involving mashed potatoes and lots of cheese. My digestive system didn’t fully appreciate it, but we kept going back for more.

The neighborhoods of Greensburg provided a solid haul of post-Halloween run clumsy-kid-candy. Ricky topped off my ‘clumsy kid’ stash with leftovers from the kids who were too dumb to ring his doorbell.

We spent a Saturday in Pittsburgh driving over the many very metal-in-design bridges, then popping into Church Brew Works for a beer and snacks. The concept was neat, the food was good, the beer was German style. We also mingled about the Shadyside area for a bit before returning to Dyna via a tunnel and some very questionable traffic patterns. Pittsburgh road design is… questionable.

Before we could extract ourselves fully from the Greensburg area, we paid homage to the shop that first diagnosed our need for an engine rebuild back in 2017. We didn’t want to believe them then, but being that the engine rebuild became a reality, we decided this shop was worthy of performing engine and generator maintenance service. I really dislike oil change days. Luckily they only come about once every 6-or-so months.

Repairs, RV Park