US Holiday part 2 focussing on another part of US history and the phone mess

Thanks to the time difference we still woke up pretty early on the Sunday morning and much refreshed. My friend's aunt and uncle live in Berwyn which is just outside of Philadelphia and as we found out around the corner from Valley Forge. So why not cram in another bit of history today? Never mind it was supposed to be a day of rest and not doing much. As you will gather, that is not what I do on holidays. Holidays are for seeing as much as you can and crashing and resting is for later.

In the morning we picked up our rental car at a local avis branch. [cheaper than doing it on the airport] Of course they did not have the car we selected in stock. We went for the cheapest smallest one and since americans don't really do small cars we were stuck with a Ford edge instead of fiesta. First they tried to give us a pick up truck but as that has no luggage space whatsoever we said no to it. Well legroom would not be a problem in our edge. 😉

First we had to get phones fixed. Modern rental cars don't come with navigation anymore and that was vital to fix. I had bought an american sim card beforehand but had been warned that it might now work perfectly due to me having a chinese phone. And indeed it proved to be very hit an miss when we there would be a connection. Not something you need while driving and needing to make a decission. The easiest solution seemed to be to switch it to Koen's phone. But that turned out to be a locked one as it did not read the card at all.

Some quick thinking and we were off to the local wallmart to get a phone. I had been wanting to get a cheap back up phone anyway so in case my phone breaks down I will be able to reach my apps. We found one for around 50 dollars [which I had actually looked at in Europe but was 100 euro more] so we got that installed the card and got it all to work!

Now we were off to Valley Forge.  A lovely warm spring day, much warmed than what we came from. Europe had had a long cold, dark and wet spring this year. We did not have the time to do this historic site in details as we wanted to take in Philadelphia highlights as well. We stopped at a few stops to have a look at the winter barracks for soldiers and officers and the fortifications set up at Valley Forge. Our final stop was Washington's headquarters. A very charming small brick house.

As we had a set time to tour the independance hall we had to be off now. Due to heavy traffic, even on a Sunday afternoon, we made it with five minutes to spare to our tour. It's not my first visit to this historic place but it was for Koen. Security is higher here then it used to be, as it is in so many places these days. The tour was ranger led and covered the most important facts around the signing of the declaration of independance. They never touch on the fact that they borrowed heavily from both the magna carta and the way the Dutch republic was run at the time. Though it was an impressive document with it's flaws as well.

When we left the hall it was at the time everything was closing up. Luckily I remembered that you could see the liberty bell from outside as well so Koen got his glimpse of that as well.

A very succesful start to the holiday.