Riding a Duck up the Delaware

The next day we drove into Philadelphia, PA with lots of time to spare. The desk staff at the Courtyard Marriot in Langhorne, PA gave us an extra large room so the kids would have room to wiggle. We quickly unpacked (including pulling in the chocolate from Hershey that now had to survive the rest of the vacation without melting) and looked at some brochures from the lobby. We passed up a nap to spend the afternoon touring Philly. We hadn't planned on spending a lot of time checking out the history of the city because we felt it would be boring for the boys at this age. But we felt it was a very important city to our country and that it would be a shame if we were this close and didn't try to see something historical. Becky found the perfect cross between history tour and fun ride. Ride the Ducks offers an open air bus tour of downtown Philadelphia that culminates in a drive INTO the Delaware River where a motor engages and pushes our floating bus up and down the river for a waters-edge tour of the city shore. As we predicted, the tour part bored the boys, but they perked up for the boat ride. Aaron thought every floating object was a fish and had a blast naming the color of every "fish" that he saw, including one shaped like a bowling pin. We got shots of Independence Hall and the Battleship New Jersey among others. We all got our own "quacker" that sounded like a duck call that we could entertain passersby with - though we had to follow the rule "No quacking when the captain's yakking." We thought it was a fun way to spend our free afternoon in Philly. Now I need to go watch National Treasure again.