Philadelphia

Hi Everyone,

We left Niagara Falls Canada this morning - another visit to customs, this time on the US side but we had no problems, all good!

We headed of to Philadelphia, which is a state full of history!  On our way to the motel we stopped off  to see the stairs where "Rocky" was filmed running up them.

The famous steps!

Of course Dave and I had to run up them as well!

We had a horse and carriage ride booked for an hour after arriving so it was pretty rushed when we checked in.Then we all walked down to where we got the ride, it was a beautiful evening 5pm, lovely and warm. We were on a carriage with another Australian couple. The only problem we had was we had had a very long day driving and we got a tour guide that "Didn't shut up". He talked the whole 45minutes about the history of the place - which would have been great if he took a break every now and then or showed some kind of emotion, it was like he was reading a script! But we did enjoy the ride!

After that we just got some dinner and headed back to the motel. Larry our tour guide is a wonderful guide, he always gives you a map of the local area near our motels and points out restaurant's and shops and on this occasion he did warn us not to go past a certain perimeter for our own safety!
We are  very glad he did that as it was not a good night to be in certain parts of Philly! In one particular bar A man got ejected for smoking -  he returned in 10 minutes with a gun and shot 6 people, killing 1!

http://www.philly.com/philly/news/breaking/20110628_Man_questioned_in_deadly_bar_shooting.html

Obviously guided tours are certainly are good idea in largely populated areas.

The next morning Larry walked us down to the Visitors Centre to get our tickets for the tour of the Hall of Independence. This was very interesting, being in the same room that the likes of George Washington and Benjamin Franklin were once in. Amazingly the building is exactly the same as it was.

After leaving this we then headed back to the visitor centre to see the Liberty Bell:

After this it was time to head back to the motel to catch the coach and head off to Washington!

This tour is very full on but we are really enjoying it and we wouldn't have had the chance to see it all on our own.

Cheers for now,
Dave and Shell