Trip to Philly

I was just on a trip to Philadelphia, where I had three goals:

• Eat a Philly cheesesteak sandwich,
• see Independence Hall
• and run up the steps of the Art Museum like Rocky.

So here are the stories with my goals. The first one was easy because the hotel and the conference center were right across the street from the Reading Terminal Market and there's all kinds of great food there.
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I had one disappointing food from there, and those were the fries from the cheesesteak place. But there was some Amish ice cream that was so good, it almost made me cry. I also got a cheesesteak sandwich with Cheese Whiz and onions.
It was pretty good.

The second one wasn't hard either because a couple of us walked that direction, looking for a place to eat, but we didn't find anything that caught our fancy, so we kept going and ran into Independence Hall.

No place to eat there, so we turned around to find a restaurant. Goal two done.

The last goal, though, was a test of my desire to follow through. Running up the steps of the art museum like Rocky seemed to be a common goal among the people I traveled with. The trouble was that we all had different times we wanted to do it. I kept putting mine off for various reasons, but the final day of the trip came and a tropical storm brought rain all day. And all day, I was at the conference. As soon as the conference ended, we went to dinner. The rain kept falling, making me wonder just how badly I wanted to run up the now-wet steps of the museum. I mapped it out and decided to walk, since it was only almost 2 miles away and I'm too cheap to take a taxi for 2 miles.

So I set off at 9:30 at night, through Philadelphia, towards the art museum. Fortunately for me, the rain stopped while I walked, but that didn't do anything for drying off the steps up to the museum. I got there, took a deep breath, and took off up the steps. Once I got to the top, I turned around and took a picture of City Hall from the top of the steps.

I made it. But I had to really want it. I don't think I have anything close to the determination and hard work that the Italian Stallion showed, but I did it.