Birthday in Philly
Editorial Note: I originally posted this along with my impressions of WordCamp Philly, but my editor, Christine McVearry thought it was semi-lame, so I’ve split it up. This post is all about family fun. My impressions of WCPhilly are over here.
On the Road…
Last weekend I attended WordCamp Philly. It was a good excuse to take the kids to Philly and torture them with some history. Sunday also happened to be my birthday, but I love WordPress so much I went anyway.
We packed the kids into our Mazda 5 (the mini minivan with no room for luggage) like sardines on Friday and drove to the Please Touch Museum for 3 hours of fun time. The ride up was uneventful although B cried for most of it. By the time we got to there, I felt like Alice:
Jen argued with me about paying for parking versus parking on the street. I chose to pay because I’d had enough with cars and constant chatter and wanted to jump out the window.
The Please Touch Museum was awesome. The Alice in Wonderland exhibit rocked. They also had that piano from the movie Big with Tom Hanks, but it has seen better days. The museum is housed in the Memorial Hall in Fairmount Park, which was the location of the United States Centennial Exposition.
My favorite part was in the basement where they had this photo:
Who doesn’t love a little total abstinence?
When we were finished with that, we attempted to drive to the hotel. It seemed simple enough. Something like three lefts and a couple rights and bam we’d be there. Unfortunately, we left the museum right at rush hour and took a slight detour by accident and ended up in Camden, NJ. This didn’t go over well with O, who was feeling carsick and had a headache.
The WordCamp Philly folks recommended the Penn’s Landing Comfort Inn, which was about 200 feet from the Ben Franklin Bridge, which made for a noisy night. A train runs over the bridge 24 hours a day. When we got checked in, the girls decided that they were too exhausted to go back out for dinner, so we ended up ordering cheesesteaks from some random delivery joint.
The girls fell asleep despite the racket. I woke up every two hours, but I’m not sure if that was the train or because N was sharing my bed and constantly edging me out…
WordCamp
On Saturday, I went to Wordcamp. Read my other post about that. It’s pretty dry… I don’t know what the kids did, but it probably involved history.
City Tavern
Saturday night we went to City Tavern. We didn’t have a reservation and they had a large party upstairs, so we were lucky to get a table by the bar. I got the ale sampler, which included a nice pale ale with sprucy goodness. The meal was rushed because B was fussing and the girls were exhausted after a day of touring historic Philly. The food was pretty yummy and we had a nice walk back to the hotel. Well, not really, the girls were complaining most of the time, but we made it.
Sunday
Sunday was my birthday and we got up pretty early even with the daylight savings time change. The girls gave me a Domo notebook and some crazy keychains from Atomic Books along with a gift card to Atomic. We had breakfast and checked out of the hotel. I was happy to bid that insanely noisy room goodbye. Then off to The Franklin Institute for almost five hours of science kookiness. Here’s a pic of the hall where they have the giant statue of Franklin with a crazy video/laser/light/I-don’t-know-how-they-do-it show.
Lot’s of interactive exhibits, including a real train engine inside the building that goes back and forth. Sucker must’ve been a hundred feet long!
On the way out of the city (or on the way to the FI, can’t remember), we saw this mural of Noam Chomsky, inventor of the cheesesteak:
