Ah, Philadelphia. Home of Rocky, the Philly Cheesesteak and for three days, host to Bryn, Tim, Alev and I... although we almost didn't make it.
We arise early on the morning after Christmas to get ready to jump onto our MegaBus from New York to Philadelphia. As a force of habit, I load up the laptop and log into my gmail account. What's this? An email from customer service? Could it be that MegaBus was responding to my complaint about their rude employee in Boston? Nope. It was a service cancellation notice.
Blizzards were expected to roll into NYC and Philly later in the afternoon. As a result, MegaBus had cancelled all their services going to NYC to Philly. Right. What now?
We quickly jumped onto the website of another bus company, Bolt, and luckily they were still selling tickets to Philadelphia. So I call up their customer service to make sure that they are still running the buses. They confirm that they are and I immediately purchase tickets for the 10:30am bus to Philly. Hey presto, we are back on track!
We arrive in Philly late in the afternoon and check into our seperate hotels (as a result as a boo boo I made during my planning). By this stage, it's snowing quite heavily but we still manage to wheel our trolley bags from one hotel to another.
After settling in, we squirrel away to the oldest Irish pub in Philadephia. Luckily for us, the food tasted better than it looked. And so, we chowed down on some pub grub that we hadn't had in a while which included a chicken parma and some fish and chips.
Tummies filled and bodies warmed, we stroll down to the visitors center. Unfortunately, most of the city has closed up and gone home in preparation of the blizzard and we have lost our reservations for a tour of Independence Hall. It appears the weather has had the better of us and we will have to rejig our plans for the next few days. However, first on the to do list is to purchase some extra gloves, thermals and scarves to help defend ourselves from the cold.
Over the next few days, the weather continues to sit below 0 degrees celsius. But that doesn't stop us from seeing the sights we were here to visit. We tick the Eastern State Penitentary, Independence Hall, the Franklin Institute of Science and eating a Philly Cheesesteak at the famed Jim's Steaks off our list. We of course also make sure to visit the Museum of Art, where there is a statue of Rocky himself and where the boys run up the steps chanting the rocking theme song.
That's it for now but there will be photos and videos to come!
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