We started off early in the morning, but almost not early enough. When we'd planned the trip originally, we were just heading to Philadelphia. We then decided to take a detour down to Dogfish Head Brewing in Delaware not only to see the brewery, but to see another state. This was a fairly significant detour but when we checked the travel times for the legs of the trip it seemed fine, in particular we thought we could get going by 8:30 or so and still make it to Dogfish on time for our scheduled brewery tour. Two problems quickly arose: first, when we checked the travel times to Dogfish we actually chose Gettysburg and not the actual campground which was about 20 minutes on the farther away side of Gettysburg from Dogfish, and second Brett had the GPS set to avoid tolls. As we were to learn the rest of the trip, most of the northeast we wanted to travel to is filled to the brim with tolls. The GPS dutifully routed us around tolls for about 2 hours when we realized what was going on and why it was going to take so long to get there. It was a good thing we left about a half hour early and were able to correct the GPS so we could actually get there.
Once we got there, exactly to the minute on time by the way, we got our safety glasses and headed in for the tour. Most of the tours were supposed to last 45 minutes tops. Ours took nearly 2 hours because we had a few slow moving people in our group and our guide was super talkative. The group behind us, which started one hour after us, finished up about 5 minutes after our group. We grabbed some late lunch there then drove on towards Philadelphia.
We stayed at the DoubleTree in downtown Philly. It would end up being about a 12 block hike to the historic sites, but was much cheaper than staying any closer. Once we arrived, we met up with some friends who live in Philly (Steve and Ruth) for dinner and trying some beers. Our first stop for dinner was Monk's Cafe, a Belgium beer emporium and gastro wonderland. They have an absolutely huge selection of beers available and the food was also quite good. Michael Jackson, the beer guru not the singing dancing sensation, rated it as one of the 5 best places in the world to have a beer and it certainly did not disappoint. It happened to be Philly Beer Week so there were a lot of special tastings going on elsewhere so afterwards we headed to Varalli which was having tasters for $5. Finally, after that we went to BRU which was incredibly loud, crowded, but did have some unusual beers on tap. Unfortunately, Megan chose to order a Carton Intermezzo. It is, without doubt, the worst beer we have ever tasted. We've already written up our tasting notes earlier for that night here and here so we won't belabor the point any longer, but you'd be better off drinking from a urinal than Carton Intermezzo in our opinion.
After that we settled in for a good night's rest as we had a long day of sightseeing and travel coming up the following day. We didn't take a lot of pictures and some of what we do have are so fuzzy and dark that we aren't going to post them (this includes every picture Brett tried to take when we were out with Steve and Ruth). The few pictures we have below are in a slideshow or you can see the full album.
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