Moving On

Well, last week was the last week of field trips for summer camp! Unbelievable. We rounded out the summer with a trip to Build-A-Bear where I made this bear. The first year I made a bear and decked it out in green scrubs and a medical kit and David was...not too impressed. Don't know what I was expecting him to be, but I was all happy about it and he was wondering what the big deal was. So last year I made a bear for my friend at work and this year I made this bear for me. More than I wanted to write about the bear, so moving on...

Friday night we went into the city to finally experience the Lights of Liberty Show. We discovered it a few years ago as we were walking by the Liberty Bell/Independence Hall area and it seemed like a really neat experience. Fast forward to Thursday night when D received a buy-one-get-one coupon in his inbox from Philly FunSavers and it was finally meant to happen.

What is the Lights of Liberty Show? Here's what their website says, "Experience the American Revolution, as it happened, where it happened – through state-of-the-art technology at the Lights of Liberty Show, the first ambulatory sound and light show of its kind in the world. As you journey through Independence National Historical Park, the story is told through beautiful hand painted images that are projected up to 50 feet high onto the buildings where the events actually took place over 230 years ago. You’ll hear a moving musical score composed for the Show and performed by musicians of the Philadelphia Orchestra plus dazzling effects produced at Skywalker Sound. The voices of Walter Cronkite, Ossie Davis, and Charlton Heston tell the tale." You can read about How They Do It, too.

Since it's a light show, tours begin at dusk and continue every fifteen up until the last tour which leaves at 9:15. We had an 8:45 tour time, so we got our headphones and met our group of thirty people near Independence Hall. Our headphones did most of the narrating as we walked through the five city blocks around Independence National Historic Park, but we also had a tour guide and two crossing guards that stopped traffic and lighted our way with flashlights.

First, we walked to the first Post Office which is at an entrance to the alley that leads to the site where Ben Franklin's house used to sit. Get all that?! Our headsets started playing at this point and we soon learned about the riots that Franklin caused by being such a vocal proponent of independence, about the meeting at Carpenter's Hall by a group of people later calling themselves the First Continental Congress, about how they amassed soldiers with the help of George Washington, about fighting the redcoats (with real smoke (fog) and everything!), and about how many, many people gathered outside Independence Hall to hear the first reading of the Declaration of Independence. That's where the tour ended, with us listening to the reading of a portion of the Declaration of Independence followed by a choir singing "God Bless America." It's definitely one of the better Philly attractions, and different, too, because you're touring the historical places at night. We didn't take any pictures for obvious reasons, but here you can see some of what we saw here (choose "dial-up" or "broadband" near the bottom of the page).