Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

We rounded out our trip back east by spending the final two days in Philadelphia. This is also where we splurged and spent 2 nights in a decent hotel. But, it wasn't that much more expensive, because I got a deal on Hotwire, and we chose to stay near the airport. This saved us money in many ways; free parking, and we turned in our car a day before we left. However, Philadelphia is a difficult city to park in, so having to drive to the city was a liability.

The Aloft hotel was very nice. The atmosphere in the lobby was "upscale youth hostel" with a hip, urban/european feel, pool table and other games, and a nice bar. Friendly staff, and loud techno music rounded out the theme. On TripAdvisor, many reviewers mentioned the music, and I do have to say, it was omnipresent. Even in the bathrooms! It could have been annoying, but I just adjusted my attitude. The hotel was very "Ikeaesque", right down to the luggage carts. The bedding and ammenities were nice though, and they had a nice indoor pool and exercise room. Down comfortors, AND, a 42" plasma TV in the room! We liked it.

When we first drove into Philadelphia from Lancaster, we drove through the big urban park, and past city hall, and ended up on South Street. I looked up to see a huge mosaic building, and we saw an open parking spot, and new we needed to stop. This amazing place was created, starting in the 1960s, by Isaiah Zagar. This particular site was several stories high, including a tiled indoor and outdoor basement, stairways, tunnels arches, and lots of nooks and crannies. Quite amazing, and I included a lot of photos here. The kids were miffed at the great deal of naked forms incorporated in the works, but I attributed that to their pre-teen sensibilities.

This same artist has also tiled many sites throughout the neighborhood, and you just can't miss them as you wander the street. Click here for his website

We also found a Whole Foods in the neighborhood (the world is getting smaller), and got some deli food to take to our room and relax.

The boy had lots of homework left to do, as we avoided it all week.

Sam groused that she was tired of me choosing all of the places to visit, so I assigned the kids to choose the activities for the last day.

They chose to go to the zoo. I insisted we needed to visit Independence Hall, as we were in Philadelphia, after all.

The next morning we woke up to snow, and wind, and cold. Sam insisted we still needed to go to the zoo. Even the boy didn't want to go anymore, but she is strong-willed. So we drove to the zoo, and got out of the car and walked to the gate. By then she realized that it really was cold, so we moved on to "Plan B", the Ben Franklin Science Museum. (We aborted the Independence Hall trip, as we drove by and saw it was mostly outdoors, no parking, and miserably cold-- we'll have to do another trip, and maybe prepare them more for it, so they'll appreciate it more).

We had a great day at the science museum.

Mom learned several things on this trip:
1) The kids are getting to the point where they need to be able to be more independent, and have more of a choice in where we go and what we do. The era of me being the boss of everything is over.
2) The kids need to take more responsibility for planning, and organizing, to go with number 1, above.
3) There is a lot to see and do in the mid-Atlantic states. We need to plan another trip to the area.
4) Traveling with pre-teens (and teens, I imagine) is not really much easier than traveling with toddlers, just more sophisticated. (PS-I'm sorry, mom, for being such a pain in the neck when I was a teenager!)

I think we'll still have fun traveling in the future, I'm just going to need to change my expectations of what these trips will look like! I think the next trip is the one we've been talking about for a while: A San Franciso weekend, where the kids get a budget and get to plan every aspect. I think they are familiar enough with the city, transportation, research, and map-reading to be able to pull it off.