Philadelphia

SM and I traveled to Philadelphia by train on Wednesday afternoon. SM's work was holding their annual meetings in Philadelphia and SM invited me to come and spend some time with him. He attended his meeting/dinner on Wednesday night and I stayed in our hotel room...a room at the Four Seasons. It was nice. I did find a Wendy's near the hotel and brought some dinner back to the room.

On Thursday morning, SM went to another meeting and I took time to walk around a bit. I found the Franklin Institute Science Museum. This place was huge and fabulous. Most of it was hands on and filled with students (elementary and middle school). They had a room about trains, a planitarium, a room about electicity, a room about the human body including a large heart you could walk through that represented how blood traveled through the heart. It also had info about muslces, bones, organs, etc. It was lots of fun. And the main event was a Star Wars theme. Look below at the picture showing Darth Vader. This was done on the stairs of the front of the Franklin Institute.


This looked cool...but I can't remember what it stood for...I think it was for the Air Force.
This is the front of the Franklin Institute. Cool huh? For those of you who are Star Wars fans...this is a beautiful sight.
After coming into the front of the Franklin Institute, you can find this statue of Benjamin Franklin in the atrium. It reminded me of the Lincolm Memorial.Here I am after exercising for a few hours. Just kidding. But this was a fun sight to see. The skeleton was actually moving on the eliptical.
This was one of my favorite statues in Philadelphia. SM joined me around noon and we started off finding some lunch and then walked towards Independence Hall.
This is City Hall for the city of Philadelphia. It was a huge building and very beautiful.

This is a picture of part of Independance Hall. It acually has two wings off to the right and left of the building. We were going to try to get into a tour but the line was really long and we didn't have time to wait that long. This is the site where delegates adopted the Declaration of Independance on July 4th, 1776.

Isn't this a beautiful cemetary? I had to get a picture of it...so green with blossoming dogwood trees. This is also the cemetary where Benjamin Franklin was buried.

And this his head stone. Tourist throw pennies onto the stone to honor him. He was the one that coined the phrase, "A penny saved is a penny earned" (I think that was it...or was it "a penny for your thoughts." Nope not that).
On our way back to the hotel, we found a plaza full of large game pieces. This is the hat from Monopoly. There were pieces from the game Sorry, Checkers, Chess, Dominoes, and probably a few more games that I can't think of right now.

Thursday evening SM was in another meeting/dinner. Friday morning we got up and caught the train back into DC. SM took the metro to work and I took the metro back home. Phew!! What a busy midweek trip!!