The Birthday Kidnapping

I have a problem, and it's called kidnapping.  We all know this about me.

Saturday, Kelly, Alex, and I kidnapped Adrienne for a wild surprise birthday trip to Philadelphia, the City of Brotherly Love.  And let me tell you, we felt the love.

We loved Rocky.

We loved running the Rocky steps while singing Eye of the Tiger.

We loved conquering the steps.

We loved all the statues.

We loved all the statues a lot.

Sometimes the statues did not love us.

We loved the Philadelphia citizens, who found my missing scarf and tied it to this lamp post so that I would find it later.

We loved the pretty bus stops.

We loved Liberty. 

We loved that Liberty is a fragile crack between rights and denials.

We did not love construction.  But we loved that they tried to make the construction pretty.

We loved the gift shop.

We loved finding a miracle of a parking space, right next to Dairy Queen and an ATM.  In case you don't know, that's a triple miracle - which is very rare.

We loved park benches and spontaneous human-sized photo frames.

We loved squatting for pictures.

We loved horse rear-ends that were made pretty with stylish braids.

We loved seeing the narrowest street in the nation, Elfreth's Alley.

And above all, we loved the Philly Cheesesteaks because that is why we came.  

And after a scientific experiment that had to be done to compare cheesesteaks, we loved Geno's a lot more than Pat's (although, Pat had the better menu instructions).

We loved the lines that extended from Pat's and Geno's until they collided into each other in the middle of the intersection.  The cars were showing a lot of honking love.

We loved getting out of our apartment and bonding and roadtrip mixes.

We loved Adrienne and her birthday kidnapping and all the love in the City of Brotherly Love.