FAILED ATTEMPT – PHILLY FOOD

Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

12/31/2009

We finally left Allentown around 11 (since that was our check-out time) and headed towards Philadelphia. Despite all the panic on the television we didn’t hit any snow at all. We stopped by our hotel (a Days Inn in Brooklawn, New Jersey) but they weren’t ready for us yet. Undaunted, we decided to drive back to Philadelphia and see our sights. It was then that we discovered that to head into Philadelphia from across the river you have to pay a $4 toll. What kind of a city is this? Philadelphia, we hadn’t even gotten to you yet, but we already hated you.

Since it was around noon at this point, it seemed appropriate to sample Philly food – which Patricia defines as hoagies and steak sandwiches. (I wanted Philly steak, Laura wanted hoagies. So we compromised – hoagies.) The book mentions the Italian Market, supposedly the country’s largest open-air market, so that’s where we went – specifically in search of Sarcone’s Deli, and its Schultz-approved hoagies.

Unfortunately, what we encountered were the scariest streets in America: angry drivers trying to illegally pass each other on one-way streets with equally-illegally parked cars on either side. You’d have to really know where you were going and what you were doing to park here. We passed by the deli, but we didn’t know how or where to stop. As frustrating as all this was, something bizarre happened that was funny to us later. While trying to navigate this maze, a car two cars ahead burst into flames. (We felt bad for that guy. That wasn’t the funny part.) In the traffic mayhem that ensued, the car in front of us put on his hazards and stopped. The driver got out – we at first assumed to help the burning car guy. Actually, he just wanted to run into a store and do a little shopping. By the time we had finally gotten ourselves around that car the driver was still inside the store, nowhere to be found. He had literally just left his car in the middle of a busy street, behind a car that might explode. Pretty cool dude.

So, while drivers were honking their horns, cars were literally exploding around us, and people were just stopping their cars in the middle of the street because they felt like it, Daniel proceeded to throw a major screaming fit in the backseat. If they made a movie about an urban nightmare, this would be it. Both Laura and I had to throw our hands in the air and abandon Sarcone’s – now our only goal was escape!