enjoy the silence: philadelphia...part 1: drive and hotel room

SO, anyone who knows me, knows i'm cheap. okay, you can stop laughing now. fine.i'm REALLY cheap. because of this, when we travel i try and find a hotel that has at least a refrigerator and microwave, then i make most of the meals that we will eat and keep them in a cooler to take with us. a lot of people think i'm crazy for doing this but it saves us so much money that we usually end up being able to buy a couple souvenirs and go and do something we normally wouldn't do because it would be more expensive.
this trip was no different. i searched for a couple weeks until i found a hotel right in the city center, had a breakfast buffet, a kitchenette and valet parking for our van. it was the most responsibly priced out of all that i checked. okay, i thought. it's pretty cheap so i'm not getting my hopes up. but after a short drive up to philadelphia (and a whole lotta time getting lost in the city), we finally parked our van right in front of the hotel and right in front of city hall! the gopher boys came right up with a trolley, packed all our stuff on it and took it up to our room. this place was crazy nice. the staff was sickly sweet and over whelmingly helpful. the coolest for me was we stayed on the 20th floor! what an incredible view we had from our windows. the room itself took me by surprise. at first i thought that they got it wrong. this was an apartment, not a hotel room. we had...

a living room with a dining room

kitchen,

a completely separate bedroom

with a bath.

HOLY COW was all i thought. it might not look nice to you, but for us this was luxury at it's finest. the buffet breakfast was awesome. it consisted of fruits, yogurt, granola, cereals, scrambled eggs, sausages, bacon, fixings for breakfast burritos,country potatoes, toast, muffins, bagels, donuts, pancakes and all and any juice, hot chocolate or tea. SO AWESOME!
all we had to do was buy ONE meal the entire trip. how great is that?

my absolute favorite were the views. this is what they were like....

city hall