When in the Course

Oct. 3-4

Joanna and I are in the Old City of Philadelphia where we are visiting the ghosts of Ben Franklin and other early framers of the republic.

Driving in this part of town reminds me a little bit of Paterson, mainly because the streets are mostly one way, and it usually seems in the wrong direction. 

As narrow as these old Colonial streets are, the city manages to make many of them operate in two lanes. 

It’s a situation full of surprises for the stranger. You can be traveling in a left lane somewhere and, just as you come to a light, find a vague painted message on the pavement warning that you have to turn left. Changing lanes at the last second isn’t practical in heavy traffic and there’s no way to go straight.

That’s how I wound up in Camden. 

What I expected to be Chestnut Street was instead the approach to the Ben Franklin Bridge.

That put us on U.S. 30 east-bound. I took the first exit I could reach on the Jersey side and looked for a way back.

After a couple of failed attempts to find a block that I could go around to circle back, we pulled over and dug out a New Jersey roadmap with a Camden inset. It took only three or four tries to figure out how to reach Haddon Avenue and which way to turn when we got there.

We found the hotel with only a little difficulty. We had stayed here before, but that was 10 years ago.

I had the faulty memory that the place is on Chestnut between Third and Fourth Streets. Not so. It’s on Chestnut, all right, but between Third and Second. Once I went far enough, it was easy.

We checked in and I took the car to the garage around the corner. On the way back I passed a few places that looked promising for dinner. There was Rotten Ralph’s, which had French onion soup, served the only way to do it, with day-old bread and melted gruyere.

We chose instead to go to Amada, which has paella. Their red house wine is a tasty Tempranillo. I expect it isn’t from Spain’s most famous wine region, Rioja, because that would almost certainly be mentioned on the menu.

The paella came decorated with a few standing slices of bread, which put me in mind of ladyfingers in a tiramisu. There were also a half-dozen small dollops of aioli.

We tried those, but concentrated instead on the rest, which was pretty familiar and very good—mussels, shrimp, chicken and chorizo in saffron rice.  There were roasted sweet red peppers, too. 

We polished that off and, full of food and wine, were asleep before 10 p.m.

The hotel is called the Independence Park Hotel. When we stayed here on President’s Day weekend in 2012, it was Best Western Independence Park.

It’s still a Best Western franchise, but now it seems the company is putting the location up front. Makes sense. It’s a great location.

Like other Best Westerns, it has a respectable breakfast selection that is included in the rent. One of the steam trays had sausage gravy, which is unusual this far north.

After all the paella the night before, I stuck with raisin bran and black coffee.

Joanna had oatmeal. I believe she put a few walnuts on it. 

Later, we walked to Independence Hall. There was a bag search when we were here last, but now it’s like a local airport. Everything from our pockets went through an x-ray machine and we stepped through a metal detector. 

Like a good boy, I had left my pocket knife in the room, so I had no trouble getting through the check.

Independence Hall is the birthplace of the three most influential documents in U.S. history: the Declaration of Independence, the Articles of Confederation, and the Constitution, which replaced the Articles.

There is a small museum devoted to the documents in one of the annexes to the Hall. Kept under glass in a cabinet with very dim lighting are first-edition printed copies of all three. 

The Declaration was published as a single broadsheet. 

The other two were much longer and only the title pages of those are on display. 

It’s impossible to read more than the headline display type of the originals, so replicas are on the wall in better light for reading. “When in the course of human events …”

You enter Independence Hall in a tour. You only see two rooms.

One is the open courtroom. I couldn’t make out much of what the ranger said because she was wearing a mask.

The courtroom had a feature I don’t remember from the last time we were here. It is a waist-high black iron confinement area that I recognized from English courtroom dramas. It is a dock, where the accused stands to address the court. Apparently it was used there in Colonial times.

The meeting chamber always feels eerie. It is set up to recreate the arrangement during the constitutional convention. The ranger referred to the large chair at the center of the presiding table as “Washington’s chair.”

This is also the room where the Continental Congress debated and then approved the Declaration of Independence. 

There's a clay pipe on one of the tables. It’s as if these guys just ducked out to take a quick breather and they’re coming back in a few minutes.

Before we left, Joanna e-mailed her nephew Scott, who lives in Philadelphia, and asked if he and his fiancee, Jen, would be free to join us for dinner when we were in town.

Scott got back to us that he had made reservations for Tuesday evening at a place on Locust Street called Vedge. And that’s what it is, all veggie dishes, each given an ingenious twist. 

It has been drizzling on and off on the East Coast since the first. It’s the fringe of the Hurricane Ian system. It has also been windy and cold.

So rather than walk the mile to the restaurant, we took a cab. We got there early, but as it turned out, that wasn’t a problem. Much to my delight, found that Vedge is a vegan restaurant with a bar. 

So I killed time by nursing an Italian white (whose name I’ve unfortunately forgotten) with a surprising bite.   

For dinner we ordered the purple potato causa, rutabaga fondue, charred squash, campfire carrot, lion’s mane mushroom, and grilled tofu. They came in two courses of three dishes each. The mix of flavors in each dish was extraordinary. 

The tofu looked like a steak of seared tuna. The carrots were charred by the flame, and, when they were on the plate, I thought they were faux sausages

If you’re curious about the food combinations, you can look at the dinner menu here: https://www.vedgerestaurant.com/dinner.

I had a flavorful Bordeaux, not the smoky flavor that’s really great, but still very good. Something else on the menu was surprising—a Malbec from Spain. Malbec means Argentina to me.  

Scott came to the restaurant from his office. He goes in a few times a week and works from home the rest of the time. Jen is mostly working at home. It seems the cats like that. Often they like it too much.

They like to cuddle up with Jen when she’s at the computer, for instance. 

I think Scott and Jen have two cats, and both cays decided to join Jen on screen one day during a Zoom meeting. She was a bit rattled by that and apologized for the intrusion.

The boss seemed to get a charge out of it. After the meeting, the boss wanted to stay online and hear all about the cats.

We ordered a few desserts. The dessert menu is also on the Vedge website. 

Everything we had was delicate and not overly sweet. The corn ice cream that came with the blackberry buckle was unique. It really tasted of corn. We also enjoyed the peach tart, cheesecake and pistachio budino.

After we cabbed back to the hotel, we finished off the night with a couple of glasses of cheap Cab Sauvignon at Rotten Ralph’s. The barkeep seems to be a UFC fan, so we got to watch two fierce-looking women box, kick, and wrestle.

All very instructive.

Peace and love to everyone.

Good night, all.

Harry and Joanna