Philadelphia Phling

At the beginning of every semester our budget always experiences this phenomena called "Tuition Shock." It works something like this: we round up every spare penny we have, make sure we have enough left over for next month's rent and pay as much tuition as we can so that we can borrow the least amount possible from the ever generous Sallie Mae. We then live very frugally and hope we have no major emergencies until we get paid again. Having recovered from our 4th episode of budget shock, we decided to use this 3 day weekend to go on a little trip to Philadelphia. The drive there was relatively uneventful, with exception of paying nearly $20.00 in tolls. This is certainly a record. We have done some pretty ridiculous things in the past to avoid paying tolls, but not wanting to waste any of our vacation time we bit the bullet and handed over dollar after dollar after dollar...

We arrived in Philadelphia around 11:30. As soon as we drove into the downtown area with all the tall buildings our trusty GPS suddenly lost all satellite connection and we were left in a strange and busy city without navigation power. We knew we were within about a half a mile from the Liberty Bell and Independence Hall, and Drew started to worry about finding a place to park. He does not like being lost at all and was getting very antsy so he swerved into the nearest parking garage he could find, and here we broke two more records. We paid $18.00 to park for the day, and we let somebody else park our car. We rarely park in DC so big city parking prices haven't really affected us before this, but it certainly seemed like a high price to pay. We had the opportunity to compare our parking rate with rates of about 10 other parking lots on our walk to the historic district of town, and we decided the rate wasn't so bad after all, but we might have done a lot better about the location! there was even a lot right under the Liberty Bell visitor center for the same price we had paid! But we did have the opportunity to explore a little more of the city than we might have otherwise.



ps. there is a lot of security around Independence Hall. I don't think anyone could wander around the building, climb around on the roof, and start pulling bricks out of the wall like they do in National Treasure. Turns out that movie can't have been true after all. Who'd have thought!
While we waited in line to get in to Independence Hall we saw a family from our ward in Arlington comming for the same tour.
Not sure why we picked this construction sign laden view of the skyline to take pictures of but you can still see some of the really cool buildings in spite of all the bright orange.

We had Philly cheestakes for lunch of course! They were very good.

We had searched long and hard to find a reasonably priced hotel in the area that had a hot tub (hotels on the East Coast don't seem to think hot tubs are all that important) so when we got to the hotel that night we were able to have a nice relaxing dip before heading to bed.

Sunday morning we began the day by checking out of our hotel room. Drew could not find his watch which he really really likes, so we searched, and searched our bags and our room. We loaded the car, searched the room, unloaded the car to search through our bags again, searched the room again, and couldn't find it. Finally we gave up and went to a local sacrament meeting before beginning our tourist activities. After church we drove to Valley Forge where we got to see lots more Revolutionary War reinactment soldiers firing their brown bess guns and setting off cannons. When we arrived Drew searched through our luggage one more time and finally found his watch all wrapped up in a shirt in his suitcase! Unfortunately we realized that we had left a "National Parks Passport" in downtown Philadelphia while we were taking pictures. I had been very excited to get this and was pretty irritated about leaving it. I acted like a 5 year old for a while and just sit in the car and sulk. Finally Drew convinced me that it was not the end of the world so I calmed down and decided to enjoy the rest of the day. In the visitor center we saw the same family from our ward that we had seen the day before. We went on a little walking tour and saw the soldiers march around to the fife and drums and demonstrate period warfare. The day was freezing cold though so after they had stopped shooting guns and making exciting loud noises we headed back to the car and drove around the valley in our car to see the rest of the sights from a warmer view. This concluded our little trip and we headed home without any incident.