My first weekend in Philly

My son and I met up early on a recent Saturday morning to take my first weekend in Philly. This was a quick weekend trip, but that is typically enough to give us an idea if we want to come back for a longer visit to explore more of a city that we’ve never been to. Heck, we’re known to go on day trips to different parts of the country to do the same thing, so getting in an entire weekend is a bonus!

We started off meeting up at Orlando International Airport (MCO) since he lives on the opposite side of the state and this is not only a good middle ground meetup, but MCO offers plenty of options to most destinations. First things first, breakfast was needed since it was pretty early in the morning and even though we had a planned layover at Dulles International Airport west of D.C. (to visit four different airport lounges), we still needed breakfast. And Zaza Cuban Cafe is one of our favorite options at MCO.

Zaza Cuban Cafe offers quite a few options and while I typically go with the traditional Cuban sandwich, this time I opted for the Cuban Philly since cheesesteaks were definitely going to be consumed on this trip.

Then it was off to Dulles to visit some airport lounges that I had never been into (my son had been into two of them).

I’m not one for paying for seat upgrades, but my son is and he was a bit farther up in the cabin.

These are the four lounges we visited, but we ended up only hanging out in the Chase Sapphire Lounge and the Capital One Lounge as the food options in those looked the best.

This is the Virgin Atlantic lounge and it had a great view, but they were still serving breakfast so we moved on.

The Air France lounge was also quite nice but they were in the middle of changing over from breakfast to lunch and the bar wasn’t open yet so we moved onto the two lounges we were really wanting to hang out at.

This is the inside of the Chase Sapphire lounge at Dulles and it’s one of the nicer lounges I’ve visited. The cool thing about these lounges is that they also have a menu you can order off of in addition to the tapas style food they offer.

The Chase Sapphire lounges also have a nice selection of cocktails available at the bar and while some of them are available at all of the lounges, they also have one or two that are specific for that lounge.

Typically I’ve liked the Chase Sapphire lounges over the Capital One lounges, but this is a sample of what they had in the Capital One lounge at Dulles and it more than made up for there not being any kind of view outside at all.

These “moon buggies” are one way to get between terminals at Dulles and I try to get on one every time I fly out of there. Check out the photo below to see one of these in action somewhere not closer to home, but with something very familiar to residents of Florida’s Space Coast.

Not my photo, but it shows one of the moon buggies getting in some work done far away from Dulles International Airport.

Then it was time to make the short hop up to Philly and to be honest, we shouldn’t have eaten so much in the lounges since we were going to be trying out some different things in the city right away.

We were staying at The Warick Rittenhouse in “Center City” which is what downtown Philadelphia is called. This hotel is a Marriott brand hotel, but it opened in 1928!

The lobby of the Warick Rittenhouse Square was pretty impressive.

The room was quite spacious and definitely had an odd shape, but it was cozy, clean and quiet. That’s all I need for a good hotel stay.

We actually didn’t check in until later, and we wanted to get out to see some of the sights so we dropped off our backpacks and headed out. Our first stop would be the historic area and we did take an Uber over to it since we didn’t really know how long of a walk that would be. Turns out that we got out of the car before arriving there because traffic was so bad and we figured that walking would be faster.

Here’s Independence Hall. It was completed in 1753 and it’s where both the Declaration of Independence and Constitution were debated and adopted by our Founding Fathers. You can go on tours, but we were there late in the afternoon and the tours were all done for the day.

We did walk by the building that houses the Liberty Bell, but the line was a couple hundred people long and we had other plans for the evening. The Christ Church Burial Ground is located right around the corner and I did want to see where Benjamin Franklin is buried. There is a small fee to go into the area and if you’re wanting to explore the entire thing it is worth it, but you can see Benjamin Franklin’s spot from outside the fence.

Just over a hundred yards away from the Christ Church Burial Ground is the Betsy Ross House. If you don’t know who she is, she sewed the first American flag in 1776.

Elfreth’s Alley is the oldest continuous inhabited street in the country and yes people really do live in these buildings. It’s worth a visit if you’re here.

My son and I had plans that evening, but we did want to check out a few things on the way back to the hotel. First up was a stop at Campo’s Philly Cheesesteaks for our first authentic cheesesteak in Philadelphia. It got two thumbs up from us and then we took a subway over to Reading Terminal Market which was at the top of our list of places to visit.

Let me start off by saying that we had no idea what to expect and were completely and utterly blown away by the place that has dozens of options for you to choose from to eat. We started off with a cheesesteak from Uncle Gus’s Steaks and then grabbed a half dozen doughnuts from Beiler’s Doughnuts. It you’ve followed along on my adventures, you know that I’m never going to pass up trying new doughnuts!

There were so many places that we wanted to try so we made the decision to stop back by the next day on the way back to the airport.

We did stop into McGillin’s Old Ale House which is the oldest pub in the city. It was a bit packed both downstairs and upstairs, so we moved onto Iron Hill Brewery.

My son is the beer drunker of this duo, but I’ll try everything he gets when we visit breweries around the country and Iron Hill makes some good beer.

I had purchased tickets for us to see the Philadelphia 76er’s play the Miami Heat at the Wells Fargo Center that evening and the subway is the quickest way to get out to where all of the sports arenas are at in the south end of the city.

It was good to see the visiting team from Florida win that night and my goal for this game was to get my son interested in seeing sports of some kind in each big city that we travel to whenever possible. I am 100% sure my ploy worked as we bought tickets for our next trip that night!

Even though we had been on the move literally all day (I woke up at 3 a.m. to get ready and head to the airport in Orlando and now it was 9 p.m., we decided to stop by Kura Sushi which was a couple blocks north of our hotel. It wasn’t anything super special, but it was quite decent and the gimmick of picking sushi out as it goes by your table on a conveyor belt never gets old.

We did discover that at least on this Saturday night, the area around Rittenhouse Park was quite lively and it’ll be worth another visit in the future.

One thing that we’ve been wanting to experience is the whole “speakeasy” thing. Back during Prohibition when alcohol was banned, businesses would pop up in hidden areas where people could grab a very illegal drink. These days there are still plenty of this style of bar around and as luck would have it, there was one of the more popular hidden bars a block from our hotel. It’s The Franklin Mortgage & Investment Company and it has nothing to do with mortgages or investments. The entrance to the bar is inside the lobby of The Franklin on Rittenhouse (a boutique hotel) and this first “speakeasy” experience has us hooked on finding more in other cities.

That ended our first day in Philadelphia and we were looking forward to our second and last day of this trip.

My son wanted to see an old cathedral and go to mass on Sunday morning and we planned on taking an Uber up to it but the Love Run Half Marathon had other plans in mind for us. So we got out of the Uber, ended up running with the crowd for about 25 feet to cross the street and made our way up to the Cathedral Basilica of Saints Peter and Paul.

The Cathedral Basilica of Saints Peter and Paul was built in 1864 and it’s one of the most impressive structures I’ve been in. Below are a few photos from inside.

After mass ended, we wanted to pick up a few things and grab some photos of this part of the city before checking out of the hotel.

We had seen City Hall the day before, but I wanted to get a better picture of the front with better lighting. That’s the most impressive city hall building I’ve ever seen.

On the way back to the hotel we stopped by a Federal Donuts location, Spread Bagelry and Kismet Bagels to pick up some goodies to bring back home.

And on the way to take a subway over to New Jersey to visit the actual reason for this trip we picked up some pizza from Alice Pizza and Restaurant which was a couple blocks from the hotel. Bringing food home from trips is something I’ve perfected and pizza is no exception, even though I do tend to get some funny looks from the TSA agent scanning my backpack at security. Every single time.

Then it was a 20 minute subway ride over to Camden, New Jersey and a mile walk down to the Battleship New Jersey. Another thing you probably know is that over the years, my son and I have visited old naval museum ships across the country (and even in other countries). We’ve been to every old aircraft carrier in the United States and the New Jersey is one of two battleships that we hadn’t been on yet (the Alabama is now the last one we have to visit).

The Battleship New Jersey was commissioned on May 23rd 1943 and saw action in World War II as well as the Korean War. She was decommissioned after that, but was brought back into service briefly in the Vietnam War for about one year and then was decommissioned again. But the United States Navy wasn’t quite done with her and she was modernized in the 1980’s and served in both the Lebanese Civil War and the Persian Gulf War before being decommissioned one final time in February of 1991. There will be a complete write up on this visit coming up.

After exploring the Battleship New Jersey we had time to grab lunch (along with some more things to bring home) at the Reading Terminal Market.

I can’t say enough about this place and it is a must visit anytime you’re in Philadelphia.

We went with some Central American arepas and Filipino pancit and lumpia for lunch, picked up some cookies from 4th Street Cookie and another cheesesteak from Uncle Gus’s Steaks to bring home and then it was time to head out to the airport to visit the brand new Chase Sapphire lounge that had opened at Philadelphia International Airport and of course to head home.

Chase really outdid themselves with this lounge. It consists of several different rooms, most with a great view of planes landing and taking off. There’s a game room and even a “brewery” themed room and we made sure that we arrived at the airport early enough to be able to spend a decent amount of time here.