Wawa Hoagie Day 2012

Yum. Free hoagies.

Wawa Hoagie Day is one of the events in the Welcome America festival (which Wawa also sponsors). Every year they've had this I've missed it for various reasons. Finally, this year I made it.

They always hype it as "everyone gets a piece of a giant hoagie" -- this year, they claimed it was 4.5 tons. Actually, it's not one big hoagie. It's a ton of small ones. But who cares? Give me a free hoagie, a bag of chips and a bottled tea/fruit drink/water and you can call it whatever you want. And even with hordes of people, the lines moved very quickly. They had a very efficient operation.

And there was a patriotic/charitable aspect as well. Police, fire and military personnel participated in a hoagie-building contest, raising funds for various charities (and I think the hoagies they made were taken to places such as homeless shelters). The USO show troupe "Liberty Bells" performed. And there was a table set up where you could write a note of thanks to be included in care packages being sent to the troops overseas.

As always, since I've given up on trying to put the slideshow right into this blog, here's a link to the album. If you want to know what I wrote in my note to the troops, go look at the pictures.

Long Overdue: My July 4th Post

Before we begin, I think I should get credit for getting this post up while it's still July...

Once again, the Welcome America festival took place in the days leading up to July 4th. It is full of great events, including free concerts and fireworks shows, as well as more fun and Philly-centric things such as Wawa Hoagie Day (which I still haven't gotten to) and one event that I've wanted to attend for years. This year, on the big day itself, I finally made it. Here's a link to all the photos I took that day. I've included a few here.

At Penn's Landing each year, the Super Scooper All-You-Can-Eat Ice Cream Festival raises money to help fight pediatric leukemia. A $7 donation gives you entrance into the big tent, as well as a plastic spoon, so you can go from table to table and get small cups of ice cream (as well as water ice and some other frozen stuff), as much as you want, all day. If you followed my updates on Twitter or Facebook that day, you know that I stopped at each of the almost 20 tables. (A number of the vendors had more than one table.) It was truly ice cream heaven. The picture above shows the size of the cup. (You weren't expecting pints or quarts, were you?) This one had rainbow water ice, not ice cream.

Thanks to a site called TwimeMachine that makes it easy to go back to look at your older tweets, here's the rundown of what I ate, and in order! Good Humor chocolate, Jack & Jill strawberry, ShopRite vanilla/chocolate, Ben & Jerry's French Toast, rainbow water ice, Turkey Hill cookies & cream, Friendly's orange sherbet, Bassetts chocolate, cotton candy water ice, Edy's mint chocolate chip, Icee raspberry frozen pop, Turkey Hill cookies & cream, Breyers cookies & cream, Haagen-Dazs chocolate, cotton candy water ice, Friendly's chocolate, orange Minute Maid juice bar, Ben & Jerry's English something (toffee?), Breyers chocolate peanut butter.

Bad Day To Miss The Eagles

If you follow me on Twitter you already know that I went to play softball this morning (after a couple of skip weeks, one due to bad weather). This was the only week so far that the schedule threatened to cause me to miss part of the Eagles game. The other weeks either my games were scheduled earlier or the Eagles didn't play until 4 pm or later. Today, however, the softball games were set for 11 am and noon, and the Eagles started at 1. So I figured I'd miss a little of the game but go to a bar and watch it. If I went directly home I'd miss the first half, at least.

I got to the FDR Park entrance at 10:30 (these fields are actually convenient for me despite being all the way down near the stadium complex, since the Broad Street Subway is right there) and took this picture of the WIP pre-game show hosts, as this is their broadcast location for home games. It wasn't very crowded around their stage at all at this point, 2 1/2 hours before kickoff.

There were two problems today: the softball teams were scrambling to have enough people to field teams (apparently a fair number of players either quit or just didn't show up), and the games either didn't start on time or ran beyond their alloted time. Thus, my first game didn't start until almost 11:20, and the second one was similarly delayed. I didn't get out of the park and back to the subway stop until 1:30, then had to wait 10 more minutes for the next train to arrive (thanks, SEPTA).

Two things amazed me at this point. One: