October 6th – Well at least I kept mom warm. But it really wasn’t comfy sleeping in the car. We got up and drove the last couple hours to Pittsburgh, boy did the traffic get heavy again! It took us at least 3 hours what the GPS said would take about two.
Oh remember those tunnels I told you about. Well I got pictures of them. They are kinda weird things you know, cutting holes out of mountains. Mom still laughs about the mountains – they are not nearly as high or as steep as she’s used to from when she lived in Utah.
I got a few more pictures as we drove through the mountains and down toward Pittsburgh. It was pretty foggy as you can see in some of the pictures.
When we got into town we drove around a while looking at the Carnegie-Mellon campus. It’s nestled well into Pittsburgh and the University of Pennsylvania is not far away. Mom decided to find a library and try to get a map or something of the campus and look again at the Robotics Institute website. Wow was parking expensive! Mom was shocked at how much it cost. We spent more on parking than anything else this day except lodging and gas.
We made our way back to campus and parked in the nearby parking garage for the Museum of Natural History. We wandered around for a bit until she found someone who could point us in the right direction and we finally found the office of the Robotics Institute.
While we were there we were invited to attend a class that was being held on Mobile Robot Design. It turns out that this class is making a Lunar Lander and Rover as part of the Google Lunar Xprize competition. Mom was fascinated to participate in the class and listen to what they are doing toward completion of the project to be launched in 2013. She spoke with the professor, Red Whitaker, for a little while after the class. She didn’t know anything about the project before and was really interested in what the students are doing.
Of course everyone loved me and that’s what I think is really important. I was good and was just laying quietly through most of class.
So what will we do tomorrow and where will we go? I can’t wait to find out!