Last week I was surprised with a day trip to Philly. With COVID road trips are a good way to get out and explore while still being safe. Philly is about 2 hours from where we live now so we drove up there on an overcast day. The drive was quick and we only stopped once for a quick bite to eat.
Driving into Philly one thing to look out for is all the gorgeous murals they have on the buildings. Philly started this program in the 1980s as an anti-graffiti program and it's now known as the nation’s largest public art program. Keep a lookout for these are you're driving through because they're beautiful and some of them would make great IG backgrounds.
The big stop of the day was going to the Franklin Institute Science Museum. They currently have a Crayola Ideaworks Exhibition which was mainly what we wanted to see. The exhibit was everything you would imagine from Crayola. It was interactive, colorful, and fun, even for 22-year-olds. The overarching idea of the exhibit is that everyone has creativity inside of them in different ways. The exhibit walks you through the design thinking process and allows you to When you walk into the exhibit you're given an electronic bracelet and you customize your color and icon that will show up on the different games and quizzes.
The first thing that you do is take a bunch of quizzes about how you solve problems. The quizzes are interspersed with games and activities like giving your own pitch of a ridiculous product or trying to figure out how to cross a river with a bunch of random stuff. After you finish that part you're taken to three different Crayola worlds where you have to solve the different problems. First, there's the sea where you tackle problems like putting together the Coral Reef and fighting pollution. Then you go to the city and help design t-shirts to advocate for biking or space exploration or some other social issue. That was one of my favorite parts because you color in the T-shirt on paper and then scan it in and it displays as if it's on your body. Finally, you go to space and become a newscaster among other activities. Each time you do an activity we scanned our badges. At the end of the exhibit, we scanned our badges one more time and were presented with our "creativity style." The creativity style was actually scarily accurate, mine was Royal purple, which meant that I enjoyed being the leader
and tried to solve problems pragmatically. I really liked the exhibit, of course, it was probably designed for people much younger than me but I still thought the interactive nature of it made it exciting for all ages.
After going through that main exhibit we explored the rest of the museum. The museum overall was super interactive. We did a physics exhibit where there were different feats of strength, tried out the optical illusions, and got shocked at the electricity exhibit. There was also a giant heart that you can walkthrough.
After the Franklin Institute, we went to Penns Landing, which is the waterfront in Philly. It was really cute but a the time most of the little shops and food stands there were closed, but there were ice cream shops, arcades, and funnel cake stands that we plan to go back for. It was still a beautiful view of the river and bridge. From there we walked into Old Town Philly and made a little happy hour stop at The Olde Bar. We just got some crab fingers, a mini seafood roll, and crab fries. It was a great snack after a long day out and the happy hour prices were great.
Our final stop was for, what Philly is definitely known for, Cheese Steaks. We ended up at Max's Cheesesteaks and the line was RIDICULOUS. Max's is considered a Philly staple and has been seen on "This is Us" and "Creed". Yet, we waited for our giant Cheesesteaks. I don't know if it was worth the whole wait but it definitely was really good, and also really messy.
After Max's our day in Philly was over. It was a really fun day where we got to experience a lot of Philly in a relatively short amount of time, making it the perfect day trip.
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