NORTH AMERICA TRIP FOR DEN & KEITH, ANG & IAN

PHILADELPHIA (May 8th – 9th)

After breakfast Ang & Den went to pick up the hire car while Keith & Ian negotiated the lifts and brought the luggage down from the rooms.

After loading up the car, Ang took us out of New York city which was easier said than done. The sat nav decided it wasn’t going to let us out that easily and started to fight back, taking us around endless loops. We eventually managed to make our way to the edge of the city and got back on track, went under the Hudson River and headed off into New Jersey towards Philadelphia.

Philadelphia is only a couple of hours away and we landed at the Staybridge Suites around mid afternoon. Our heads were still spinning a little bit from New York, so after checking in we chilled for a while and then headed out to Chilis restaurant for a nice dinner, followed by a few games of UNO and some wine back at the hotel.

Next morning breakfast was great and this is probably as good a time as any to reflect on a few of the nauses we have met at breakfast over the past 9 weeks:

The first nause is the ‘dawdler’ who seems to take forever to decide what they want to eat, while simultaneously blocking off access to everyone else. Now don’t get us wrong, it’s fine to take your time and be relaxed on holiday, but there is a big difference between that and a full blown food and beverage audit.

Secondly, we have the ‘one in four’. This is a single traveller who decides to occupy a table of four in a very busy breakfast area, full of groups of people looking for somewhere to sit. Nice one and great awareness!

Next and similar to the ‘dawdler’ is the ‘blocker’. In some hotels, the breakfast area can be a bit tight and things are put close together and this is where the ‘blocker’ excels. They are usually on the larger side, so you can’t reach around them easily, are often deaf as they can’t hear you say ‘excuse me’. They love to stand by the toaster, waiting several minutes for their toast to pop up, while blocking off access to all other areas nearby, like the cereal, yoghurt, milk, eggs and coffee.

There is also the ‘slowcoach’ who you should all be familiar with. This person is a combo of the ‘dawdler’ and ‘blocker’. As the name suggests, this person takes out one pumpkin seed or one cornflake at a time, takes forever to choose a banana , pour a cup of coffee, make a cup of tea, or choose their tea bag.

Then we have the nause who decides to repack their rucksack, change some clothes and also fill three large water bottles in front of the water dispenser, because lets face it, that’s not going to be very busy at breakfast is it!

Also the kids, though to be fair, they have normally been really well behaved, apart from when their parents become oblivious to what they are doing. Then you get a six year old getting more cheerios on the floor than in their bowl and you end up ‘crunching’ everywhere you walk for the next 30 minutes.

Another favourite is the ‘weekly food shopper’. Most of the time the guests will take the odd muffin, an apple, banana and even a few boiled eggs with them to serve as a Scooby snack throughout the day. This person goes on a weekly shop, stocking up for a good few days while persistently getting in the way of everybody else. Thankfully, they didn’t usually take any waffles as the equipment to make them looks like the cockpit from Apollo 13 and there were always a few people mulling around trying to work out what to do.

Last, but certainly not least, we have the weaver. This person can turn up anywhere, at breakfast, the airport, the theatre, the sidewalk, Walmart, etc. They are unable to walk in a straight line, utilising a box of tricks like body swerves, sidesteps and 360 degree turns that would not look out of place on a rugby pitch. The only course of action is to wait patiently behind them or pass them with a very wide berth.

We hope you enjoyed reading about the nauses we met on our travels as much as we enjoyed talking and chuckling about them.

Back to Philadelphia. The city is generally recognised as the birthplace of the USA, now that really is some good pub quiz stuff. It’s where the founding fathers gathered to draft the Declaration of Independence (DOI), which is basically the birth certificate of the USA, on 4th July 1776. The document announced that the 13 American colonies were officially severing ties with Great Britain to become independent states. Before 1776, the Americans had been fighting the Brits to redress a few grievances about their basic rights, but after the DOI things escalated very quickly into the full blown war.

We took the car into the city and then caught the tour bus to see what was going on. Philadelphia sometimes gets a bad rap for being a bit rough, but we thought it was a really nice city, especially the area around the old Colonial buildings. This included Independence Hall where you guessed it, they signed the DOI, nice one.

Close to Independence Hall is the Liberty Bell which is recognised as a symbol of American independence and freedom. Legend says the bell rang on July 4, 1776, to announce the signing of the DOI. In reality, it was rung a few days later, on July 8, for the document’s first public reading, but let’s not spoil a good story. There was a very long queue to see the bell and we thought, nah, as we could see it quite clearly through the window where it is housed.

On the tour bus we learned about Benjamin Franklyn. We reckon this guy had more time on his hands than Leonardo Da Vinci, he was into everything. Apart from being one of the founding fathers who signed the DOI, he was: The President of Pennsylvania, the USA Postmaster General, the 1st President of the University of Pennsylvania, the city Chief Architect, an Inventor, the city Fire Chief and a million other things. Even the tour guide got fed up mentioning his name as we went round the city (ha, ha). He is even buried in Philadelphia so you have to drive past his grave everyday just so you don’t forgot about him.

The other big thing Philadelphia is famous for, well for us anyway, is of course the Rocky steps. Specifically, for all you movie buffs, these are the steps that Rocky (Sylvester Stallone) ran up at the end of his training montage in Rocky 1, (1976). There are 72 steps in total and they lead up to the east entrance of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, which is a stunning building that opened in 1928. The steps have since become a physical metaphor for an underdog rising to a great challenge and at the top there is a large bronze Rocky statue that is actually owned by Stallone. We hopped off the bus tour and headed over to the steps where there was a lot of people mingling around as we made our way up to the top. The view is also amazing looking straight down the Benjamin Franklin Parkway (yes, him again) that leads directly to the city skyline.

After the steps we caught the bus back to the city centre and after a little walk around we grabbed a coffee before taking the car back to the hotel. In the evening we headed out to a ‘boujee’ Indian for a little bit of spicy food craving. We were checking out the next day and heading off to the nations capital, Washington DC.