Experiencing America's Birthplace
What we saw in a day in Philadelphia
In Mission: Wanderlust, I write and podcast about our family’s travel adventures and the things that we have learned along the way.
We were never returning to Philadelphia.
Really, we were never going back. Our kids could go on their own. We never needed to return to the city, ever again.
We visited Philadelphia during the summer of 2006. I had attended a conference in Washington D.C. at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum and we decided to turn the trip to and from D.C. into a vacation. Philadelphia had been one of our stops. We found the city crowded, dirty, and not full of brotherly love. While kids were still something far in our future, we decided there was no reason for us to ever return to the city again.
It’s true, never say never, because in the summer of 2022 I ate those famous last words, much to the chagrin of my grimacing husband.
When our son said he wanted to go to Gettysburg, I started dreaming of the thing that had not been possible in the six years that we lived in Texas: a true east coast vacation. And in order to work our way from Indiana to Maine (which eventually got cut from the itinerary), we would have to go through Philadelphia. And if we were going to have to go through Philadephia, we might as well stop.
And so I planned for three nights at the Philadelphia South/Clarsboro KOA Holiday in New Jersey (which meant another new camping sticker on the travel trailer) and tried to convince myself that maybe my feelings about Philadelphia had been colored by youth and the experience of living in a mid-sized city. Maybe I would feel better after living in Houston for six years.
The moment we crossed the toll bridge from New Jersey to Pennsylvania, we were reminded of the traffic and the congestion and trying to drive around a city that had been built for horses and carriages, not thousands upon thousands of vehicles. The first time we were in Philadelphia, we had a small Ford Focus; this time Jeff was driving our much larger F250. We approached Independence National Historic Park only to discover that it was blocked off, and we spent the next 1.5 hours (you read that right) looking for a place where we could park our oversized truck and not walk several miles through a city we didn’t know. Jeff even tried heading to the Edgar Allan Poe National Historic Site, a place we had been in 2006 and one I wanted our kids, who are entering the years of Poe literary study, to see. Unfortunately, parking around that site just over a mile away was even harder to come by than near Independence Hall. We gave up that pipe dream and just kept looking for a place we could rest our truck for a few hours.
When we were finally parked, we walked our hungry bodies toward the national park, hoping we would find a good place to eat once we knew what was around the square. Then we discovered why there had been so many crowds around the national park: National Hoggie Day. The local grocery chain was giving away free hoagie lunches, which meant that we didn’t have to search for where to buy lunch. Thankful that the crowds were not for protests like we feared and instead were for free food, we joined thousands of Philadelphians and tourists on the grounds of Independence Park to eat our hoagies and chips and drink our bottled water.
The visitor center, which was new to us, houses both the National Park Service and general Philadelphia tourism offices. We enjoyed the interactive exhibits, got helpful information about tickets and tours inside the park, and appreciated the conversation with a knowledgeable park ranger.
We left the visitor center to head across the street to the President’s House Site and the Liberty Bell. The President’s House Site is a newer addition to the park and explores the paradox of the Declaration of Independence in the face of a still-growing slave trade. The exhibit traces the footsteps of Martha Washington’s personal slave, Ona Judge, before and after she escaped from the household in 1796.
We walked through the Liberty Bell Center and finally stood in front of the most famous bell in the United States. We read as much of the history as we possibly could and stood in the relatively short line to get our pictures in front of the bell.
We walked across the next street to visit the buildings that witnessed America’s Founding. Our first stop was a tour through Congress Hall, a tour that we didn’t need tickets for; we just needed to get into the line for the next tour early enough to beat the rest of the crowd. We sat through a park ranger’s description of the building’s importance in American history and the important moment when our country experienced the first peaceful transfer of power between George Washington and John Adams. Then we toured the upper chambers before heading back out into the sunshine.
We walked through the Great Essentials exhibit in the next building and viewed original copies of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, our kids finishing up the last of their Junior Ranger questions before we returned to the visitor center. In what signified the end of a parenting era, our kids humored me through one Junior Ranger swearing-in, the only official swearing-in of our entire vacation. But I was glad they begrudgingly gave me that one vacation experience before we finished up our day in the city.
Our next stop was a quick tour through the Supreme Court Chamber in Old City Hall while we waited for the after-hours tours of Independence Hall to start. When it was finally a few minutes before 5:00 (all tours before that require a timed ticket), we became the first in line to wait for our tour of the place where the Declaration of Independence was signed into history. It was the perfect end to what had started as an incredibly frustrating day.
Philadelphia will never be my favorite city. In fact, it is far from it, but there is something to be said for standing in the footsteps of giants. Our founding fathers (and mothers) were flawed human beings concocting a political experiment that, on the surface, was doomed for failure. They tinkered and adjusted. They fought and they compromised. Unable to see the social, geopolitical, and technological challenges of the future, they put a system of government into place designed for that moment with tools for making the necessary changes in the future. Nowhere does this hit home more than while standing in the halls where some of those very conversations happened and deals were made.
Yes, I had said I didn’t ever want to go back to Philly, but there was something both inspiring and heartbreaking as we visited America’s birthplace during the most politically tumultuous period of my life. I will forever be thankful for the work the NPS park rangers are doing to bring America’s complicated narrative to life for all visitors to ponder.
And I guess that in a small way, that makes our short visit to the City of Brotherly Love worth it, at least a little.
The YouTube summary of our trip to Independence National Historic Park can be found here:
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