On a recent trip with Profile and QBP in the FBM bus, we traveled around the great state of Pennsylvania.
While driving from Pittsburgh towards Woodward, we took a slight detour to explore a small city I had never been to, Johnstown Pa.
I had remembered the name from the stories of the floods, and it being where they filmed the fictitious city from Slapshot where the CharlesTown Chiefs called home.
It’s a small western central Pa. town in Cambria county, with maybe 20 thousand people living there, under an ominous shadow of a giant, empty steel mill at the bottom of one of the steep hills the city rests in, You could tell it’s a city raised on hard times, and you can see it in the locals.
We met some kids, who had probably never ventured far beyond the valley, although there smart phones were connected to the rest of the world, they were pretty firmly rooted in that old steel town reality, one kids name was 3 eyes, the other Andrew Dice Pants, and Lance B. Johnson, that seemed like a former professional surfer from California, who loved women.
We pedaled around, the city square, past the empty bars that probably used to be full of old steel workers, closed down business’, old railroad depots and more.
It was a weird scene, kind of a screwed up reflection of the American dream, caught somewhere between hopeless despair, and the industrious optimism of hard work. We didn’t find many spots you would typically see, but like the city itself, we found some cool shit and made the best of it, in-between rain, wind, and dilapidated bricks buildings. We ended up having some of the best fun of the trip.
