For some reason, neither of us woke up to late, but I suppose that's only to be expected on the second day when things start to catch up with you.
Breakfast was late at around 11:45 in Dunkies across the road from City Hall, which isn't the best of places to be, there's a lot of aggressive beggars around here and we got followed in the shop by one, most shops would have kicked them straight out but not here. There are a lot of crazy people in this city which goes some way to explain the murder rate & the number of shootings over the last few days, which stands at 3 dead & 14 other people shot since we got here 3 days ago.
Something we tried to do the other day was to buy a Septa key card that you then load with cash or add passes so you don't have to mess about with coins on local transport, but wasn't able to do this due to a very unhelpful woman who worked on the station that kept saying that the only ones on there were for regional rail train, which is a load of crap because its the same card for everything the only difference is on regional rail you tag in and out with the card as it's distance based travel and not flat fare pricing like in the City. Even though you have to pay $4.95 for the card, then it only costs $2 per ride with it as opposed to $2.50 so it paid for half of itself in one day.
A short ride on the #4bus took us to the Rail Park, which has just had the first section completed, even though it's only a short section, there's a lot of work gone into turning what was an old disused railway on an elevated section into a linear park, it's a really peaceful place to be and even has some swing benches made out of the old steel work. There are 2 other sections that have yet to be started & involve it going into a cutting & a tunnel, given that it has taken this long to get this far with only a short section I wouldn't hold my water for the next part.
It was a bit too warm to hang around on here long but not very far away is Reading Terminal Market, this place is an indoor food court in what I believe was an old railway station. There's all sorts of food on sale here, but was a bit on the busy side so we ended up just having a couple of beers at the bar which was a bit crowded as they seem to really into the Wimbledon tennis final! I thought it would have been expensive, but only came to $12 for 2 beers & 2 cokes but I don't think they charge for soda in most decent dive bars (if that's a thing?) if you order beer with a soft drink, it varied from place to place along with how much pay per drink at what time of the day. The system here was if you sit at the bar they put your seat location into the till and you pay when you leave.
Things went a bit sideways now when we left, the plan was to catch a couple of buses to the Washington Street Pier, it wasn't too long to wait for the first one, but just missed the second then there was going to be a 40-minute wait. Aaaarrrhhh. There's nowhere to sit and not much shade, but looking at the map it was about a 20-minute walk, so it's time to walk.
It was nice to stroll along the lower part of the Delaware Riverwalk, which brought us out at Walmart, which was a relief to get into and out of the heat.
They even have a Macdonalds in here so got something to eat, then caught another bus from the parking lot to a place called the Singing Fountain. This area has plenty of trendy bars and we went into a one called The Pub on Passyunk. Strange name & a bit of a dive or perhaps it was urban trendy I'm really not sure.
We only stayed for one drink & the bus stop was literally right outside the pub so caught the #45 back to Jimmy Johns for a sub. We got back to the hotel later than planned but this was mainly due to the buses being crap.
