cheesesteak anyone?

Well, after a busy and crazy beginning of the week, I am finally taking a deep breath and continuing with my tale of Philly and New York.

First, car is home and well, Sage continues to gain strength from her infection and Grandma is dancing in her wheelchair ( seriously she was dancing when I went to see her yesterday) so officially relaxing.

Now....Philly, I left off with D and I and the family RAV and a GPS device called Garmin.

We drove fairly uneventfully to Philly for the day on Saturday June 21st.

We arrived in the beautiful historic district, parked and immediately went to Betsy Ross's house.

What an amazing tale she has, a feminist before her time, working in a basement on a flag that if caught, could have seen her condemned for treason and keeping a business running on her own, with or without a husband. Very cool woman.

We then decided the historic district and alllllll the people could wait, and went to Little Italy for a Philly Cheeseteak. MMMMMMMMMMMMMM. 

It was a little like ordering soup from Seinfelds "the soup nazi" episode...but the guy screaming from behind the chrome covered corner shop, winked at me and let know he was doing it all for show. D stood in the spot the Rocky had ordered his cheesesteak in the first Rocky movie..lolololol.

A quick stop in a bar....( I needed a  bathroom and there nothing around ) saw a couple of old withered and leather skinned men slapping each other......lol.....it was pretty funny but we opted to not have a beer there.

We then head to the Philadelphia Museum of Art, at least we would have had D listened to me and NOT the Garmin for directions, once we arrived at the parking lot. 

Instead he drove in a circle, away from parking, and ended up in a detour that took us 90 minutes and several worried moments, through the really low rent districts of Philly, complete with visable guns, bullet holed, burned out cars and wow....if I hadn't been so mad at D for not listening to me, I may have been scared.

We did eventually find our way back to the Museum and the parking lot we had almost entered originally and spent a fantastic 4 hours with Degas, Renoir, etc...etc...etc...

Absolutely phenomenal. I can't tell you what it was like to see the brushstrokes, the textures, the energy, the colours, the everything about these works I had seen only on slides or in books.

There were these wonderfully knowledgable security guards who helped us to find our faves and there was one man who looked like he had lived his whole life inside the museum. He had a little leather bound black book full of noted about the art, the artists and the people who honor them. Very cool guy. I asked him to direct me to Cezanne, and without missing a beat, knew exactly where the painting I was looking for and led me there.

Awe struck and emotional we leave the museum and head back into town for dinner.

Night looked a lot different downtown and we opted to park H and E's car in a secured parking lot before finding a wicked retro diner "The Continental" The best lobster risotto ever....EVER!

The adventures seem to be done for the dat and we head for home trusting the voive of Garmin to lead us there......after "recalculating" a few times and getting us onto a freeway she promptly ran out of juice leaving us without directions home......UH OH!

We did manage to get there eventually, but first found ourselves in some crazy wooded areas of the Pennsylvania subarbs and a lot of gas stations who had neither a bathroom or an English speaking attendant who could help us... OI!

Much after dark, we finally made it home and shared our tales with the family.

Sunday June 22nd and D wants to go back to the Outlet mall for more shopping. I tell ya, he can shop better than I can. and we have a nice end to our time in Philly.

One more sleep will see us driving into NY and the smells, sights, sounds, sweat, splendour of the city.

More to come.....