Philly Trip

 2024-10-15

I had the good fortune to travel with my mom to go visit my sister.

Roughly mid 2011, my sister moved from the CA Sacramento area to West Virginia and there eventually she settled in the Philadelphia area.

Traveling is time consuming and expensive. Multiply that by the size of your family and its only affordable once a decade. Most of my adult life, my finances and career have not allowed me very much time or money to do this sort of thing. Melissa and her tribe have come out west a few times. I think over the past decade it has been 3 times, but I did not get to see her every time.

This time however, I got to join my mom for a full 7 days of fun. My mom has gone back often, and asked me if I would go with her. Heck yeah I would

Funny enough, we have these same 3 feather pictures at home. My mom and I laughed when we saw them

Reproduction of a famous Jesus painting. To bad I didn’t write it down

This original painting has been used as a demo for compression. I found this fantastic because using Lego is a form of manual compression. Its sort of meta

The kids minecraft server had a lot of 2d pixel art. Caralyne’s friends were very creative and made a bunch of characters out of dyed wool blocks. These lego’s here are a spitting image of what they had done over a decade ago. I still have a map of that world, and sometimes I remember to turn it back on

Philly Museum of Art. A proper art museum. I had never actually been to one like this, I feel like PDX and the west coast in general lack bonafid art museums at this scale. I was very impressed

This painting made me thing of Mundaun, one of my favorite games I had played this year

Really stunning staircase. I like archery, I am a simple man to please

David and Goliath. Love the art style, some real dark fantasy. Could have been concept art for Dark Souls

I think the caption said at one point, the skeleton was painted out. That really redefines the message of the painting. This version is better

Reiterpallasch. This is the last Fromsoft game reference I swear

This fake plaza is right out of Assassins Creed. See, not a Fromsoft reference!

Cool tapestry from India. Something about monsters. Naga maybe?

Rocky statue. I refused to stand in line because I’m to cool. Or, its anxiety. Either one… John offered to stand in line with me, but some dude with parrots was throwing parrots at me and I just wanted to be far away.

A wild city dewlling groundhog! Just there! Not predicting sping at all!

Finally, some hockey! Jaden, my newphew, is 26. I had a good time watching him play. He was only put in the penalty box once and I was expecting more

This is Lewis. John immediately told me ‘she will fit in your suitcase’. I laughed, but upon hearing her relentless meowing and John eventually yelling LEWIS! I understood why he might want to give her up. I described her meow as if the Aztec Death Whistle took a cat form. She is a tiny little murder machine. She has a clipped ear, because she is wild. All she wants to do is go outside and kill things. My sister lives on a very busy road, and they don’t want her to die. I understand. She was also super snuggly and I couldn’t help but fall in love with her

This time, it is Talia’s turn. She played against older kids and was unfairly beat in my opinion

At this point in the trip, Melissa and John took me to a very fun haunted house event at Pennhurst Asylum. Photos are not allowed there, and I really would have liked to have captured some of the displays. We made it back to the AirBNB my Mom and I were staying at. Most of these evenings we were all up until almost midnight. That is typical for me, but I was pretty amazed my Mom was staying up that late as well

Whenever I see signs like think, I can only think the subtext is ’thanks for the tourist income, please dont move here'

Time for a nature walk! We picked up some sandwiches. I was promised authentic philly cheesestakes, so even though John had to go back to work, he gave this local place the blessing. So, I ordered like a tourist. The lady behind the counter asked me what I wanted, and then I peppered her with “okay but what do you recommend? What cheese would you put on?”. I feel confident in saying she hooked me up.

Perkiomen Creek. I thought it was a river. A creek to me is crossable on foot

My mom and Talia did about 2 miles, and then stopped at the park. We all ate here, and I was so excited for the sandwich I only remembered to take a picture half way through. DELICIOUS

Melissa and I continued on a walk for another two miles before headin back. It was a lot of fun just talking with her. I wish I had more moments like this with her. This is The Duck Inn Taproom in Collegeville. Probably a great place

Not an alarming sign at all, especially since a section of the fence looked like inmates folded it down to esacape

A group of deer came across the path, this large buck was bringing up the rear

We had a fig leaf plant in our living room. It died, but I’m sort of glad it didn’t reach this height

Happy walkers! Melissa will always be my big sister. I have no idea when I got taller. I was probably standing on her feet to be a jerk. Talia is great, I had to pester her a little because John wasn’t there and I think that helped out. Me. It helped me out. She probably hates her Uncle Mikie

my 23k steps day. I like to at least get 8000 steps a day, but with traveling and other things I did have a few days less than that. This day brought the monthly total average back up

What can I say, it was a fantastic trip. It was the first time in a very long time that I took a trip with my Mom, and I’ll be honest… I was curious if we would remain civil with 7 days together. We haven’t been around each other that long since I lived at home. Well, I am older now and less obnoxious so we got along just fine. She went to bed early and I read. She got up at the crack of dawn and I set my alarm to make sure we could have coffee together at a reasonable time.

My nephews and niece are older. Jaden and Colten are men now. Off to college, and soon, embarking on their own lives. It was nice to see them again, talk to them like adults, and just be happy that we’re all together having a family moment. I know I don’t have a lot of rapport with Talia, and I try to make the most out of my experience with her. She’s a great kid. Between my kids and my sisters, its shocking they are ALL nice people. No sociopaths or psychopaths. We as a family have our more than fair share of issues but everyone is a kind person.

Seeing my sister and John was the best. Almost every evening we would end up at their place and just talk until the bugs showed up and it was dark. I had a hard time saying goodbye to Lewis though. And John. I asked him if we can leave Melissa out next time and he said of course.

LOVE YOU SISSY!