50miles Of Philly & Not A Single Cheese Steak (a photo tour)

Last week I had the pleasure of going to Philadelphia for the very first time as I joined my girlfriend who was attending a librarian conference there. We were blessed with incredible weather and lots of free time to tour around on foot, which of course is the only real way to check out a new place. 

I gotta say Philly is one amazingly historic and beautiful city. It has its issues for sure, a few of which are that people love to relentlessly honk the hell outta their car horns and often it's difficult to surmise why they even honked to begin with. Garbage doesn't seem to find its way into garbage bins all too often, and the city certainly appears to have seen better days. 

There is a definite rough edge quality to Philadelphia, which was evidenced by the fact that Linda's cell phone was stolen from a restaurant we were in only to give us a GPS signal 24hr later from an area north of us. Upon filing the police report their exact words after hearing me say I wanted to head up there and knock on the door was "We don't even wanna go up there!"...so none of us did, as of course police can't just knock on someones door and say "Hey a GPS signal says you stole this girls phone. Please give it back." Despite this however we had an incredible time and thoroughly enjoyed the fact that everywhere you turned there was history to be had, as should be the case within a city founded in 1682 that was the largest city in the US at the turn of the 19th century. Below are some of the highlights of the week

Less than two hours after hitting the tarmac at the airport

Scalpers tickets got me into Philly vs NJD

By the 1st intermission I was drinking with the locals. Note that my MHW Effusion DryQ jacket in Flyers Orange certainly helped with the male bonding/free beers.

Flyers win 3-0 and lots of history hanging in the rafters

Yo Adrian

Came across this personal shrine on our self guided city run tour

Street art is always worth checking out

Captioned: Their bands have broken asunder

View back over the city from the run along Schuylkill River

Amazing statues/history at every turn

The City of Brotherly...

Yeah we had to. Celebrating our 33km run

Kinda says it all

Yes their sign is completely warranted

Visiting Princeton Tec factory

Getting to personally construct two Fuel headlamps

Crashing the Librarian Conference Party...free drinks!

Talkin to a few stiffs

How they really worked their way through the signing of the Constitution

No gluten free, soy free, dairy free options...weird

The Liberty Bell

Big fan of these sidewalk accessed underground staircases

Things I should not be able to forget I packed in my carry on and find once I arrive

Best window seat ever for return flight

And as mentioned above I hit 52miles / 85km of running. It's all starting to come together. Slowly but surely.

GR