How do you visit and see the downtown area of a big city like Philadelphia when you travel around in a big yellow truck. This is a question that has occupied our minds a lot as we have thought about how we will travel in Europe. The answer we have arrived at is to park/camp outside the city and become foot (or more accurately public transport) tourists for the day. Today was our first opportunity to put this plan into practice. So just after 8:00am this morning we drove the beast from the campground to the local train station and boarded one of the SEPTA trains for a 50 minute journey into the center of Philly. That was easy and the day continued in that vein.

At the visitors center we got an early ticket for a tour of Independence Hall, a short line up of 15-20 minutes got us into the Liberty Bell, a 2 hour open-topped bus tour of the city gave us a good sense of the scope of the downtown area, and the day finished off with a movie at the visitors center that made an appropriate distinction between the American Revolution and the War of Independence.

The presentation by the park rangers at Independence Hall was excellent. In the space of 20 minutes they explained in colloquial terms the rise of revolution and war, the Declaration of Independence, the Articles of Confederation (and Perpetual Union) and its successor the US Constitution.

We arrived back at our campground hot but satisfied.