Philly Itinerary Challenge:  Planning a Weekend Visit to Please the Folks

By Lindsey Shapiro, Events Coordinator, AmeriCorps*VISTA

Next weekend, my parents are coming down from Massachusetts (my birthplace) to visit my adopted home of Philadelphia, PA. Hooray! But what's the sub-text? I need to craft a weekend-long "Best of Philly" experience to remind my parents why it's OK that I'm not moving back to some second-rate New England city.

Plans for out-of-town guests always require a little brainstorming, as I can't very well expect them to accompany me in my normal life (bars, sandwich shops, and X-Files). And then there's the whole parents piece--parents generally don't want to get pretzels at 1 in the morning. Then, there's the unique challenge of pleasing MY parents--two people who belong in an SAT-style analogy (Robin:Ray::Shopping for boots:Playing Settlers of Catan). That is to say, they don't have much in common.

So, here's the challenge: find things to do in Philly that showcase its greatness and appeal to two people in their mid-fifties with incredibly disparate interests. And go.

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