LIving Room Rug

We finally did it!

With the help of Karen, our new decorator

and Fiesel patiently showed us rugs

from his Vienna shop.

The leafy foilage is just right

for the cottage feel.

Also, we're keeping the blue walls

so we have green on the floor

and blue on the walls

just like outside.

Kitchen Rug

We have a Rooster rug!

Our trip to Philadelphia

Ma and Dad convinced me to go to

Philadelphia with them.

There is a lot to see and we stayed

in a lovely hotel.

Unfortunately, Bret and Adam

stayed home being

busy with work and school.

Rittenhouse Hotel

This interesting painting was in a stairway

off the lobby.

Hi Mom, we'll be right down.

Rittenhouse Hotel

My room

Rittenhouse Square

Our hotel was on a beautiful square.

It had lots of benches and green space.

Lovely stone entrances on each corner

accenting the diagonal walkways.

Stone entry

Another building:

Catholic Philopatrian Literary Institute

Architectural Eye Candy

Near Hotel

A delightful bakery:

How fitting, a little religious interlude
amongst the bakery offerings:

Anyway, where were we...
Oh yeah, and this is the star of the show...
The chocolate ganache covered creation:

yum yum yum

Dad surprised me in the car, on the way home with some.
Thanks Dad!

Some architectural eye candy:

Museum of Art

Boat House Row

I didn't take these photos.

But they show where we looked for

bathrooms and breakfast

at 5:00 p.m.

(yeah that's right, breakfast at 5:00 pm)

Wikipedia tells us:
Boathouse Row hosts several major rowing regattas. The boathouses are seen as centers of the rowing community around the United States. Rowers from the boathouses compete at every level, including local clubs, high schools, colleges, summer racing programs, and international-level athletics.
In 1979, lights designed by architectural lighting designer Raymond Grenald were installed to outline each of the boathouses, giving them a nightly Christmas-like gingerbread house appearance and reflecting in the Schuylkill River. He proposed the lights after hearing talk of destroying the decaying Victorian boathouses. Lights on the buildings at night would serve to make them more noticed and appreciated. In 2005, after two refurbishings, the houses were outfitted with computerized LEDs that can light up in various colors, depending on the event or season.
Boathouse Row is a National Historic Landmark and was entered onto the National Register of Historic Places in 1987.
Local universities (including Drexel, Saint Joseph's, Villanova, Penn, La Salle, and Temple) row from a boathouse along the Schuylkill.

Betsy Ross House

Wikipedia tells us:

The Betsy Ross House is generally recognized as the place where Betsy Ross lived when she may have made the first American Flag. The house is located just blocks from Independence Hall and the Liberty Bell.

The front part of the building was built around 1740, in the Georgian style, with the stair hall and the rear section added 10 to 20 years later. Ross is believed to have lived here, with her first husband, John Ross (d. 1776), from 1773 to about 1785.

Independence Hall

Corn Exchange National Bank Building

The details in this building caught my fancy

so I snapped a few angles:

Old City

Look! Elbow Lane! The Bourse was closed.

That's okay, it's just Impressionists

and guys like that.

Liberty Bell
National Constitutional Center
Independence Visitors Center
which houses the Liberty Bell

Elfreth's Alley

Elfreth's Alley is a residential alley. It is one of the oldest continuously inhabited residential streets in the country, dating back to the early 1700s

Wikipedia tell us:

Elfreth's Alley is named for Jeremiah Elfreth, an 18th-century blacksmith and property owner. Among the alley's residents were tradesmen and their families, including shipwrights, silver and pewter smiths, glassblowers, and furniture builders. In the 1770s, one-third of the households were headed by women. The Georgian and Federal-style houses and cobblestone pavement of the alley were common in Philadelphia during this time.
In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, industry began to change the street. Perhaps the first was a stove factory that in 1868 took its place in a row of residential houses. Eventually, factories surrounded Elfreth's Alley. The city's waterfront was only a few blocks away. Industry changed more than the architecture; successive waves of immigrants, lured by the nearby jobs, moved onto the street; in 1900, the neighborhood was overwhelmingly Irish.
In 1934, the Elfreth's Alley Association (EAA) was founded to preserve the alley's historic structures while interpreting the street's 300-year history. The EAA helped save the street from demolition, and also lobbied the city to restore the alley's name to "Elfreth's Alley"; it had been designated as the 100 block of Cherry Street years before as part of a street-name simplification program.