Day 13: Philadelphia: City of Brotherly Love. And shooting the English.

The tour kicked off without a hitch. Perhaps being on a smaller cruise ship helps things go faster, with none of the queuing and chaos that happened several times on the Sun Princess. This is only our first tour, so I’ll allow them time to screw up later.

Philadelphia was prettier than I expected. Just a few miles outside the centre of the city we hit the first forests, with housing scattered in relatively low-density developments. It was certainly much less dense than I’d expect to find a few miles from the centre of Sydney.

Our first stop was Valley Forge. The American Army was getting the worst of it against the British during the third year of the War of Independence, so Washington withdrew from Philadelphia and quartered his troops in Valley Forge.

It wasn’t exactly like staying on the Crystal Symphony. Food was tight, not helped by staying in an area with strong loyalty to the Crown, and the troops initially only had tents to sleep in. Later they built log cabins, twelve men to a cabin.

Washington and his staff stayed in one of the local farm houses. The original house is still standing, and open to tourists.

It would have been cramped, cold, and made more miserable by poor Internet connections and lack of cable television.

In the afternoon we had lunch at the City Tavern, a meeting place of many of the colonies leading figures in the period leading up to the Declaration of Independence. I had the tasting selection of four beers brewed on colonial recipes, including favourites or beers associated with George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin (Philly’s second most famous son, after Rocky/Sylvester Stallone)and Alexander Hamilton.

We also did the obligatory stop at the Liberty Bell, which was kind of cool and kind of “so what?” at the same time.

I was more taken with our stop at Independence Hall. I hadn’t really thought much about where the Declaration of Independence and Constitution had been signed. Now I knew where: here.

The ranger who gave the talk,Ranger Gus, had a phenomenal knowledge of the history. He knew the names, state and substantive histories of every signer of both documents.

Where the depth of his knowledge really shone was when answering questions. Someone would ask about some relatively obscure signer – or for that matter some colonial figure who wasn’t even present – and get a detailed history of where he was from, the date he arrived, what he’d had for breakfast, what colour his socks were, and why he had had to leave two hours before the signing because his third daughter Meg had burned down the blue barn on his Georgian plantation.

Back on ship we went to our first show, a singer named Kristiensen, who had played the role of Christine Da’ae opposite Michael Crawford for several years. Emma, being an Andrew Lloyd Weber fan, was very keen to catch this show. As for me, if Iwas given a choice between a) being wrapped in long strands of barbed wire, rolled in wood chips, and fed to starving beavers, and b) listening to Andrew Lloyd Weber, would start singing “Oh, Canada” and look forward to the gnawing.

I can’t say I enjoyed it very much.