ACCOUNTANT BY DAY

Yesterday was my first-ever trip to Philadelphia, and although last night I felt strongly that Philadelphia is at best a giant hairy cancer on the face of America, I have calmed down enough to give Philly a second chance. For two reasons.

1. I feel like I should love Philly. I thought I was going to. There is a TV program on FX that stars Danny DeVito and is about Philadelphia and I love that. Also, I like the name.
2. Philadelphia is an important historical city. With fancy things.

But Philadelphia also has some serious drawbacks. From what I can tell these drawbacks are almost 100% related to the pain of getting around this place in a car. First of all, we left the airport and had a 20 mile drive to King of Prussia, where we were going to spend the night in the Holiday Inn Express. It took like an hour to get there, because nobody was going more than 30 miles an hour on the highway. A lot of people even appeared to be voluntarily driving slowly based on the distance they left between their car and the next, but this did not stop them from becoming agitated and beeping their horn at those other cars for no apparent reason.

In Kansas City, horn honking is reserved for only certain situations requiring urgent communication with other drivers. It says, “Excuse me, but you have sat through this green light twice - is it possible you have suffered a stroke and need some medical assistance?” OR, “Oh dear, it appears that you are about to collide with me. Would you mind not doing that?” You could drive to work for a year without honking the horn even once. In Philadelphia the horn is used as a important warning signal to alert other drivers when their speed decreases to the speed limit, or to reprimand out-of-towners for the crime of driving on the road.

When we got to the hotel we were both starving, so we went to the large mall just across the way and split a tostada pizza at the California Pizza Kitchen. By the time we left it was getting a bit dark and the rain was coming down harder than before, so we went straight to the car and headed for the hotel. We made it to within 1,000 feet or so of the hotel, but the problem with Philadelphia is that 50% of the streets are one way, divided, and 85% of the streets do not permit a left turn. We made one wrong turn and from that point could not get out of it and had NO CHOICE but to get on the Pennsylvania Turnpike. NO CHOICE!

I think if either of us had realized how terrible a mistake this really was, we would have simply piloted the car into a barrier and killed ourselves rather than live through the next 90 minutes and $4.25 of tolls. And then a native Philly driver would have arrived and helpfully notified us that we were not traveling fast enough.

I was not kidding when I said 90 minutes, either. We were prisoners of the State of Pennsylvania for an hour and a half, which was as depressing as it was embarrassing. When we first got on, we realized we had to drive almost 15 miles to the next exit to turn around. This was disheartening, but not the end of the world. Coming back, the exit back to King of Prussia was not marked correctly due to the construction, which caused us to overshoot it and go to some terrible place nearby, like Norristown or somewhere. Then we tried to go back, spotted the hotel, and it still took us 20 more minutes to get back to it. By that point, neither of us could speak an entire sentence without inserting the words “fuck”, “cocksucker” or “bullshit”.

Looking back, I attribute this terrible experience to four things:

• Philly roads are weird, twisty and not marked clearly. Sometimes a road with no signs telling you what it is is an important road that you have to drive on, but you don’t find it because you are looking for what your Mapquest instructions or the tollbooth employee told you to go by
• It was dark and raining hard, so we had a hard time seeing the signs to begin with.
• In the midwest and in general in cities designed on a grid, the northbound and southbound sides of a divided highway almost always mirror each other. You get off the highway, go to the other side of the highway, and can get back on. It is not like this in Philadelphia because this city is too freaking old for that, and we didn’t figure this out soon enough.
• In Kansas City, there are exits everywhere. You can hardly go two miles without running into one. In west Philly you can miss your exit and have to drive 10 miles before you get another one, only to find that you can’t actually turn around because there is only an exit there and not a way to get back on and you have to drive 3 miles in some other direction to get to an on-ramp.

I’m not judging. I’m just saying.