Philadelphia - Day 2

Saturday morning we were joined by Adam who came up from Baltimore to visit the city with us. We started with breakfast at a nearby diner and headed to the Independence Visitor's Center, conveniently located a block from our hotel. The Visitor's Center has some displays on the history of Philadelphia and a few movies, which we didn't watch. We did pick up our tickets for the Independence Hall Tour later that day. Next door was the Liberty Bell Center, which houses a small museum on the history of the bell and the actual bell! Pictured is me with the bell on the non-cracked side. Tourists everywhere! Since we had an hour to kill before our tour, we decided to walk around the rest of the Independence National Historic Park and visited a lot of the buildings and parks.

Second Bank of the United States

After going through security, we got our place in line for the

Independence Hall tour.

The tour was fun and informational (the Declaration of Independence was only adopted on July 4th!) but we were getting hungry so we headed south towards South Street and the Italian Market.

Mr & I split a sandwich we picked up from one of the deli's at the market. Really delicious! Adam opted for the more popular philly cheesesteak from Pat's (Geno's, the other cheesesteak place, is pictured below) while Mr & I ate at the Royal Tavern. The lines at these two places were really long and we didn't want a cheesesteak that badly. Royal Tavern was much better and had beer! After a nice long lunch and a few beers, we were ready to head to the Philly Craft Brew Fest at the Navy Yards in south Philly. We braved the subway to get there and the brew fest was offering free shuttle rides from the train station to the event, which was at

the Navy Yard, not really within walking distance of the station. The brew fest was very crowded but they had lots of beers to try. After an hour or so, we were getting pretty tired of the crowds and had tried over 15 beers at this point. So we opted to leave a bit early, grab a cab and head back to the hotel and hang out in the Old Town neighborhood for the rest of the evening.