It’s always fun to walk around Peddler’s Village and get some Christmas shopping done. This visit was on a rainy evening, but the wet sidewalks just made the Christmas lights look even more magical. We also walked across the street to check out their annual gingerbread house competition entrees. The judging was already complete but we saw some cool creations. View the photos here.
A few years ago, we went to Easton, PA for their garlic festival and it was a lot of fun. Check that out here. So, when we heard they were having a bacon festival, we knew we wanted to go. We braved the massive crowd and sampled some delicious bacon products. We also watched the hog calling contest (seriously). We might have hung around longer, but the crowds were getting to be a little too much. I’m really glad they had a great turnout, but it made it really hard to walk around.
Despite being a week away from having surgery to repair the injured knee, I decided to test my stamina and walk around the Philadelphia Zoo at night during Christmas week of 2019. There were no animals to be seen. Instead, the zoo was alive with lights. They put on a light display called LumiNature. It wasn’t a traditional Christmas light display by any means. It was more like something out of a fever dream with a giant tree make of plastic pink flamingos, talking Christmas trees, a giant polar bear made of car doors and a field of color changing penguins. It also had an educational element to it mostly talking about conservation. For me, it was also nice to get out of the house and experience something new knowing that it would be the last I’d be doing it for a while after my surgery.
I’m not usually one to go on any kind of vacation with no planning, but one Thursday night in February 2019 I found myself booking a hotel reservation (thank goodness for Hilton points!) and packing at midnight to leave for Lancaster County PA on Friday. It would turn out to be one of the most eclectic weekends we’ve had in a long time! We drove directly to a small supermarket to buy a button that would admit us to a chili cook-off (more about that later) and then headed to downtown Lititz for their Fire and Ice Festival. The ice part consisted of 75 ice sculptures lining the streets and 20 or so ice carvers creating more sculptures as we walked around. The fire part of the evening was a fire show set to music over the duck pond in Lititz Springs Park.
On Saturday morning, we went to the local high school for the second fire phase of the festival, the chili cook-off. We tasted 14 chilies made by a variety of local chefs, each supporting a different charity. Some were better than others were. Ironically, the one Lancaster County restaurant entrant that I’m familiar with, Isaac’s, got our votes. I swear I wasn’t biased! After the cook-off, we drove around Lancaster County before enjoying a relaxing dinner at Miller’s Smorgasbord Restaurant. We’d never been there and since we were playing tourist, why not? Besides, the little spoonfuls of chili didn’t exactly fill us up at lunch. Then we headed back to the hotel, relaxed with a cup of coffee and met a scary clown in the lobby. Yes, you read that right! Zeebo, the scary clown. There’s never a dull moment on a Gatti vacation!
On Sunday, we checked out of the hotel and went back to Lititz to a wolf sanctuary. It was a fascinating place. Most of the animals there are actually wolf dogs but have too high a percentage of wolf DNA to be legally kept as pets. There are also some full-blooded wolves. They’re beautiful animals and all very well cared for. Unfortunately, thanks to the ridiculously warm weather we’ve been having, much of the snow melted and we were up to our ankles in mud the entire time. We got cleaned up and did another Lancaster tourist thing we’d never tried before, an Amish buggy tour. That was fun too. Our driver was ex-Amish, so I found it particularly interesting. He didn’t whitewash the story of the Amish. He told it like it is. It was hard to take any photos out of the buggy windows, but we learned a few things. Then we headed out of Lancaster County; stopped at Valley Forge Casino for a little gambling and dinner and then headed home.
We were looking for a place to grab some dinner in Northeast Philly and stumbled across the Ashburner Inn. We figured we’d get a sandwich or some appetizers, typical bar stuff. When we arrived, we were greeted by a really nice dining room. It was bright, cheery and very clean. As we walked to our table, we noticed nearly everyone was eating pizza. When our waitress told us that it was half price pizza night, we understood why. The brick-oven baked pizzas on the surrounding tables looked good and the price was certainly right! So, we ordered 2 pies.
The pizzas were delicious. They were some of the best I’ve had in a long time. The crust was light and crispy and the variety of topping choice was great. Besides some of the basics like pepperoni, sausage, etc., they also have pizzas with prosciutto and roasted peppers, chicken and blue cheese, buffalo chicken, spinach and roast pork and others. We particularly like the Ashburner which had spinach, roasted red peppers, shredded mozzarella, buffalo mozzarella and prosciutto.
I’m sure the Ashburner Inn has other good food, but I will be back again for the pizza!
The new observation deck at One Liberty Place has been open for a while now, but too often, you don’t think of going to tourist attractions near home. I finally spent a day heading to the top of the formerly tallest building in Philadelphia to check it out. I was pleasantly surprised. After lunch a little Belgian place in Center City, we went up once during the day and once after dark. The views were impressive and they do a nice job of interpreting all that you can see from the 57th floor. I even learned a few new facts despite living here all my life. We also checked out the ice rink at City Hall’s Dilworth Park which was a nice way to get into the holiday spirit.
The last time I went to the circus when it rolled into Philadelphia, I was in elementary school. When we heard that Ringling Brothers was shutting down the circus for good this year, we decided that we should go see its last hurrah. We splurged a little and got seats in the second row. There were two separate touring shows this year. The one that came to Philadelphia was “Out of this World.” (The other being “Circus Xtreme.”) Wow, what a difference from the last time I saw the show. I remember seeing Gunther Gable, elephants and a unicorn. I probably don’t want to know what kind of animal rights violations were committed in the production of the unicorn, but I did miss the elephants. As for Gunther, there was a big cat trainer there who was also quite good. The other surprising part was that besides the acrobats, clowns, contortionists, dog trainers, etc., a portion of the show was also performed on ice. Add some horse stunts, motorcycles in a steel sphere and a menagerie of animals including a kangaroo and you have quite a fun spectacle. It’s really sad that this will be the last year that anyone will get to experience it.
Relive the circus experience by checking out my photos here.
Despite living in the Philadelphia area my entire life, I’ve never gone to the annual Philadelphia Flower Show. I’m not necessarily a flower enthusiast, but I’m a photographer and have spent plenty of time photographing flowers elsewhere like Longwood Gardens, the Macy’s Flower Show in Chicago and many other places. This year’s theme was Holland and tulips are my favorite flowers to photograph so how could I resist? Despite it being a damp rainy day, we hopped on the train to Center City and spent the day indoors enjoying the sights and sounds (Dutch techno light show, anyone? See the video below.). It’s truly amazing to see what the Philadelphia Horticultural Society builds inside the convention center. Besides flowers, the amount of stuff they load in there, trees, landscaping, tons of dirt and mulch, art exhibits, etc. is beyond impressive. It made for a fun (and colorful) day.
I just posted the last of my photos from 2016. Back in October, we spent a long weekend at Lake Wallenpaupack, a man-made lake in the Northern Poconos created as a reservoir for a hydroelectric plant. Because we left in the evening after work, we stopped and spent a night at Sands in Bethlehem before heading the rest of the way up to the Poconos. Our first stop was in Honesdale to board a train for a scenic ride along the path of the former Delaware and Hudson Canal to check out the beautiful Fall foliage. We then headed to Hawley to check in to our motel right across the street from the lake. We sent much of the weekend walking and driving around the lake and exploring downtown Hawley. Along the way we found time to stop at a few very cool diners. After heading out of town, on our way home, we went to a cider mill because nothing says Fall like a cider mill. Then we visited the home of the first chief of the US Forest Service, Grey Towers. It’s now a national historic landmark and museum. All in all, it was a slower paced, more relaxing vacation than we usually like to take, but it was still a lot of fun.