Skip to main content

#51 - visit the Liberty Bell

The weekend before we left for Florida, we drove up to D.C. to say goodbye to my family.  While we were in the area, we decided to venture north for 2 hours more and spend a day in...

 Philadelphia!  (For you non-baseball fans, that's the Phillies Phanatic. Scary, huh?)

We met up with our extra-awesome friend Angela to tour the sites, including one that just happened to be on my list. (I won't try and pretend that crossing an item off my list and hanging out with Angela weren't my primary motives for the Philly trip.)

Here we are, in line for the Liberty Bell.  The two girls in strange outfits standing behind Angela represent everything wrong in America...namely, cutting in line.  Ok, so that's more like "everything wrong with the third grade," but really--who cuts in line to see the Liberty Bell?! 

When I visited the Liberty Bell for the first time back in 2002, it was just a glass enclosure.  Now, there's an entire Liberty Bell Center!  It was VERY impressive. 

 The funny thing about the Liberty Bell is that no one knows for sure whether it was actually rung at the public reading of the Declaration of Independence.  It wasn't even called the Liberty Bell until the 1800s!  The amazing thing about it is the symbol for liberty that it's become, regardless of how it got its crack or when it rang.  It's what people have made it!


So there you have it--#51, complete!  We visited a lot of other places on our Philadelphia trip, but that's a story for another blog.





Comments

  1. AnonymousAugust 12, 2010 at 1:59 PM

    I'm going to have nightmares about that mascot. Thanks. Your hair is crazy long! And beautiful, but that goes without saying.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

#16 - go to Claytor Lake

Yes, it is mid-January, and yes, I did decide this was a good time to visit a lake. Claytor Lake has free admission if you bring your Christmas tree for them to submerge as a reef for the fish, so off we went! It was a balmy 60 degrees with some pretty good wind, so not too terrible overall for a go-outside-in-the-dead-of-winter activity. We had fun throwing rocks in the water (B) and walking the trails (decidedly not B, who announced "I'm bored of walking!"). But hey, we did the thing.  (Currently making plans to come back in the summer when we can actually go in the water!)
Post a Comment
Read more

#29 - write in a journal weekly for six months (1/27)

Ok, blogosphere.  It's time to get serious.  One of the items on my list is keeping a weekly journal for six months, and since I'm getting dangerously close to not having six months left in those 999 days, I better start now.  I'd much prefer to keep a paper journal, but it takes so long to hand-write things.  (First world problems, right?)  So here we are. I'll be pulling prompts from this website whenever I get stuck...so, basically all the time.  I really struggle with blogging because I'm too worried about how I come across to the people reading it, and that distracts me from writing about real things like how I really want to play a Dungeons and Dragons game (I'm serious, you guys) and how I may or may not have left a load of laundry in the washing machine for two days and am writing this to avoid dealing with it.  First up is something eerily similar to those Livejournal/Facebook "fill this out about yourself" lists, so consider this m...
8 comments
Read more

2021, in conclusion/memoriam

We're all just ignoring any and all goals we set during the pandemic, right? Right. After the nightmare that was 2020, 2021 wasn't so bad. I submitted my first first-author publication  that uncovered a long-standing misconception about airborne transmission of disease, and it got me featured in WIRED magazine . I successfully defended and submitted my dissertation about volunteer health communication in US refugee resettlement. (Those two projects sound very unrelated, but medical rhetoric is the key there :) :))  After 2 years of doctoral coursework and 3 (soul-sucking) years of dissertating, I graduated with a PhD in Rhetoric and Writing from Virginia Tech. My mental health immediately   improved. While I was finishing my dissertation, we sold our townhouse in Blacksburg and moved to a 1910s-era bungalow in coastal North Carolina. My daughter started 1st grade (!) in a Spanish immersion program. We all got vaccinated. I was on set as an extra in a Simu Liu/Phillipa So...
Post a Comment
Read more