Philadelphia and Doylestown, PA
This past weekend I ventured to Philadelphia to check out the Liberty bell, Independence Hall, and take in the sights of historic downtown Philly along with 6 million other people, Katie and Meghan included. Philly has quite an impressive network of trains that can seemingly take you anywhere you want to go. You actually pay for passage upon boarding the train, and the experience is far more personable than riding in an NYC subway car. I’m accustomed to the train operator mumbling incoherently about what the next station is over the speaker-system, but on these trains the ‘ticket master’ would open the car door and announce, incoherently, our arrival at each station.
While the historic Philly sites were interesting, what I really enjoyed was walking around on the WWII diesel-electric submarine “Becuna” and the 1898-built iron cruiser “Olympia” at the Philadelphia Seaport Museum. Though this one is over 300 feet long, submarines are just plain cramped, and I was only on it for 20 minutes. I couldn’t imagine being trapped in one on a lengthy voyage… especially with four 16 cylinder diesel engines running! The Olympia, on the other hand, was powered by some monstrous steam engines. At full speed it used 600 pounds of coal per minute! Nearby there is a monument dedicated to Christopher Columbus, which sufficiently enraged us and is an opportune time for me to share a quote from the author Kurt Vonnegut:
“1492. As children we were taught to memorize this year with pride and joy as the year people began living full and imaginative lives on the continent of North America. Actually, people had been living full and imaginative lives on the continent of North America for hundreds of years before that. 1492 was simply the year sea pirates began to rob, cheat, and kill them.”
Sunday we spent the day near Doylestown PA checking out the Henry Mercer museum and Fonthill. What’s interesting about the places designed and built by this guy are that they’re all ENTIRELY made from concrete. Even the roofs are reinforced concrete. Though a millionaire, he made bookshelves from his era’s milk-crates and recycled things he got for low or no cost nearby. After discovering that a recently acquired couch would not fit in the room he wanted to, Mercer hacked the back corner off and then proceeded to file a chunk of concrete out from the wall in order to get it to fit. Ingenious!