Our Ithaca Adventure: Philadelphia weekend

January 26-February 1

We spent the whole week of school preparing to visit Valley Forge and Philadelphia. We found some fun curriculum about being a Continental soldier, so Benjamin and Oliver were super prepared to see the military huts and had a pretty good layout of the land and living conditions before we got there on Friday. We spent Friday driving through the snow and got to Valley Forge just after lunch time on Friday. We spent 1-2 hours there before going to Philadelphia.to visit the mint. Oliver really enjoyed visiting the mint since he started collecting pennies this year.

Examining the huts at Valley Forge

Valley Forge posing

After checking into our hotel, we walked to City Tavern for supper. This was the tavern built by the gentry of Philadelphia in the 1770's and the chef there has worked to replicate the food of the times. He has television shows and lots of cookbooks on the subject. It was a really great experience and our server was extremely friendly, informative, and nice to the kids. After supper, Vince came to see Chad and we all walked down to see the Liberty Bell at night before heading off to bed.

City Tavern dessert tray
Chad was enamored by the wine soaked pear, but we had chocolate mouse cake and raspberry linzer torte instead.

Our hotel had Liberty Bell waffles

Saturday morning we walked down to Independence Park to tour Independence Hall and the Liberty Bell pavilion. All of the park rangers are passionate about history and gave such good presentations that the morning flew by. The rangers carry trading cards for the kids to collect after answering a simple question. I haven't counted how many cards we ended up with, but it is a hefty pocket full.

Independence Hall Assembly Room

At lunch time, we walked down to Reading Station to meet Vince and Oscar for lunch. We all enjoyed the cheese steaks, amazing soft pretzels, and rich ice cream. Then we walked to the Franklin Institute together. Oscar was very excited to show his new friends (us) all around his favorite place in Philadelphia. We crawled through a giant human heart, and explored a very complicated neural network in a brain model. The museum closed too soon for us, but we had to leave. We walked back toward the city center and found a small Korean restaurant for supper. Then we walked Vince and Oscar back to the train station and took a nice long night walk back to the hotel. Everyone slept well that night!

In his preparations, Chad had found that the first Catholic church in Philadelphia was just around the corner from our hotel. Sunday morning we went to Mass at Old St. Joseph which had been originally founded in 1733. It felt very much like the Jesuit church that Chad and I used to attend in Baltimore, both in architecture and atmosphere.

After some food, we were back to Independence Park to visit Congress Hall and to get the kids' National Park Junior Ranger badges. We walked around the Old City some more, passing Benjamin Franklin's house and printing press, Betsy Ross' house, and Christ Church Episcopal church that Franklin and Washington attended. On the way out of Philadelphia, Chad drove us through the neighborhood where his Grandpa Joe had grown up. From there Chad drove through four hours of blizzard to get us back home to Ithaca.