By Glenda Booth for Beacon Newspapers
There are many good finds in Pennsylvania’s Laurel Highlands, an undulating countryside 50 miles southeast of Pittsburgh.
Visitors to the 3,000-square-mile region, which encompasses Westmoreland, Somerset and Fayette Counties, will find Pennsylvania’s highest peaks, rolling hills, small towns, covered bridges and dense verdant forests that burst into blazing colors in the fall.
The area gets its name from the flowering laurel shrubs that bloom each June. But since 2001, the area has been best known for what happened on 9/11, when hijacked United Flight 93 crashed in Shanksville, killing all aboard.
A more comforting association would be with the children’s television hero Mister Rogers, who died in 2003. Fans of Fred McFeely Rogers — the soft-spoken, fatherly host of “Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood,” which aired on television from 1968 to 2001 — can learn more about him at the Fred Rogers Center located in his hometown of Latrobe, Pennsylvania.