Philadelphia

Pairs well with baseball

/ Greg / Leave a comment

Champagne and salty, buttered popcorn. A deep, rich California cab and a medium-rare grilled steak. A plate of fish tacos and a margarita (or three). Some things are just meant to go together. While I’m a bit of a beer snob and can give you food pairings for just about any type of beer, I think beer may be best paired with baseball.

While sitting outside on a perfect summer night at a ballpark, a cold beer in my hand is the perfect accompaniment to the three hour drama that is a baseball game. While my Philadelphia trip was mostly about baseball, its secondary theme was definitely beer. Trying new beers at the games, sampling beers at interesting craft beer bars and breweries, and beers for the hotel. I picked up these beauties shortly after landing and cracked open the definitely non-craft Yuengling first. For me, Yuengling tastes like Philadelphia and brings back all kinds of memories of being in the city in the late 90s and early 2000s.

Craft beers in Philadelphia

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Mural mile south

/ Greg / Leave a comment

With so much time spent in Philadelphia over the years, the time around the edges of my baseball trip gave me a chance to dig a bit deeper into the city. Having previously explored museums, public art, music, sports, and food (oh, the food!), I was scratching my head during the planning for the trip on how to dig that little bit deeper.

What I came up with for a morning of exploring was a series of urban murals that are part of a public art initiative. A density of murals south of Market Street made that an easy choice and it also helped that by walking south of Market and east of Broad, I would be heading in the general direction of my favourite cheesesteak place, Jim’s Steaks, on 4th.

On a humid morning not out of place on the east coast in late July, and sweating through my shirt before I was only a few blocks out of the air conditioned comfort of my Center City hotel, I started my exploration. If you know me, you’ll know that “Gimme Shelter” by David Gunn, painted on the side of the Morris Animal Refuge, would tug at my heart strings. The shelter commissioned this beautiful mural to help tell their story of providing adoption services for abused and abandoned animals.

Murals in Philadelphia

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Take me out to 5 ballgames

/ Greg / Leave a comment

I aim to take full advantage of my solo trips. When I’m traveling alone, I make the kind of plans that I couldn’t get away with if I was traveling with others. My favourite solo trip plan, something I’ve been doing the past few years in an annual tradition of sorts, is to camp out in a big American city for 4-5 days, and spend most of that in a ballpark nerding out over baseball. The last few years I’ve pulled this off in Baltimore, Minneapolis and Chicago. This year… Philadelphia.

Five nights, five baseball games. After arriving in Philly via a red-eye and fortified by a brief nap at my downtown hotel, I hopped on the Broadway subway line and made my way out for night one at Citizens Bank Park in south Philadelphia. I treated myself to what would be the best seat of my visit a mere ten rows off the field. Here’s the first pitch from that glorious seat.

First Phillies game

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Rolling with the punches

/ Greg / 1 Comment

I recently wrote about how friendly I found Nashville to be.  But the metaphysical Nashville threw some things at me to test my adoration – I had my pinky finger slammed in a cab door when a bellboy closed it in haste, was stuck for the better part of a half hour in a crowded malfunctioning hotel elevator and got trapped in a cab with a cabbie suffering some sort of emotional distress who wanted to take me somewhere other than back to my hotel (the first time in my life I seriously considered jumping out of a moving vehicle).  That would normally sour me on a place, but not with Nashville.

Rolling with the punches is a life lesson travel will attempt to teach you pretty often.  If you can take the inevitable challenges travel throws at you with a dose of good humour, you’ll at least end up with a good story in the end.  After my finger was slammed and stuck in the cab door and the requisite screaming was done, I asked the bellboy for some ice, a towel and two Tylenol, then got the cabbie to take me where I was planning to go.  My finger was all kinds of swollen and sore, but this was my one chance to see the Country Music Hall of Fame.  I was even the recipient of a sympathetic free shot of bourbon at a downtown bar later that day when the bartender caught a glimpse of my finger.

Traveling home from Nashville, I had another opportunity to roll with the punches.  My flight from Philly was cancelled leaving me with ten hours to kill and a strong likelihood my new flight would never take off.  What did I do?  I ticked two things off my “not yet in Philly” list.  First, a cheese steak from Tony Luke’s, and the best one I’ve ever had in the city in my well researched opinion:

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A William Penn’s eye view

/ Greg / Leave a comment

On each successive trip to Philadelphia it gets a little bit harder to find a “new to me” attraction to visit.  That’s probably a good thing.  Trips back to Philly are now more about neighbourhoods, restaurants, and events.  But on my last trip, I did a tourist thing that was right under my nose for all my previous Philadelphia visits.  Unknown to me until last year, you can buy a ticket to take an elevator to the top of Philadelphia City Hall to get an incredible panoramic view from the base of the William Penn statue that overlooks the center city area.

For a city the size of Philly, it’s a bit odd that none of the skyscrapers have a publicly accessible observation deck.  But from the top of City Hall, about 500 feet above street level, you get some pretty nice views.  First, here’s the view straight down the Benjamin Franklin Parkway:

Looking down the Benjamin Franklin Parkway

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A night with the Broad Street Bullies

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When I was growing up, although I was a Nordiques fan, I had a soft spot for the Philadelphia Flyers.  Mostly that was due to the fact that I was a big Ron Hextall fan.  As a chubby kid whose dad had a nice set of goalie pads, I found myself in nets a lot, and loved trying to play like Hextall.   Fast forward 25+ years, and on my third visit to watch the Flyers play, little did I know that the game on this night would feature something very Hextall-like:  a full blown goalie fight.  More on that later.

I got to the game just as the gates were opening so I could take in some of the warmups from ice-level.   Slipping past an usher, I made my way down to just behind the Flyers bench as they took the ice.  On the left, the view of the Capitals warming up at the other end.  On the right, Steve Mason warming up with former Halifax Mooseheads star Jakob Voracek looking on:

Pre-game warm-ups
Pre-game warm-ups

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Public art in Philadelphia

/ Greg / 3 Comments

On this trip to Philadelphia, I decided to skip going to one of the traditional art museums in the city for a bit of a different experience.  The city has something called the “Museum Without Walls” which is a program of the public art around Philly.  There’s an iPhone app with commentary and maps for all of the city’s public art installations.  With some great weather days, I got a healthy dose of fresh air and interesting art while walking off those delicious cheesesteaks.  Here are some of my favourite pieces from the city center area.

Across from the Pennsylvania Convention Center in Lenfest Plaza is “Paint Torch” by Claes Oldenburg.  I really liked Oldenburg’s installations I’ve seen in Denver and Seattle so was excited to see this one before heading into my conference across the street:

Paint Torch

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Philadelphia: 6 days, 4 sandwiches

/ Greg / 3 Comments

Six days, four delicious sandwiches.  I’m not sure that’s the right ratio.  It would have been more sandwiches, but there’s just so much great food in Philadelphia that I couldn’t limit myself to having all of my meals squished into a roll or between slices of Italian bread.

My version of sandwichpalooza was of course going to feature a cheesesteak.  My first one of the trip, on the first night in Philly, was had at Campo’s.  I’ve only had one other Campo’s sandwich, and that was at a Flyers game a couple of years back, so I thought I’d try one from their “real” restaurant.  The Cheez Whiz may not look tasty, but trust me, it works really well:

Campos cheesesteak

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