couchsurfing Pittsburgh

Our friends and family are concentrated in the northeast, and we have kept our lodging expenses to $0 by imposing on their hospitality.  (Thanks, everybody!)  Now that we are heading west, we have to be more creative.  We recently signed up for couchsurfing.org which sounds a little sketchy, at first.  But the safety-focused website is framed much like a ‘host family for a night’ application with lots of manditory disclosures and safeguards.  The profiles I’ve seen are mostly 22 year old backpackers, and the others all used to be (myself, included.  Frankly, if this website had existed in 1992, I could have saved a lot of money on youth hostels.)  So far, Logan and I have stayed with two couchsurfing hosts in Pittsburgh, both of whom are wonderful.  They cooked us meals, flipped us their keys, and generally treated us like a friend-of-a-friend in need of a place to crash for the night.  I hadn’t planned on this aspect of our journey, but it is certainly adding to the educational experience.  We would never meet so many new people if we were sleeping in campgrounds or hotels as simple tourists.