Philadelphia on a Budget

This summer my family and I took our first vacation together - a five day trip to Philadelphia and Sesame Place. I spent weeks (months) agonizing over the details, hotel prices, 2 1/2 year old friendly activities, anything free(!) before I finally started ordering tickets, making reservations and printing itineraries.

First things first, when ordering tickets for Sesame Place there is virtually no way to get around the $47.95 ticket charge for anyone over 2. By the way, I think it is totally ludicrous to charge any child under four full price for anything, no memories of the event = half-price entry. I justified this first major purchase by reminding myself that these were two-day tickets and I could bring my daughter back for a day trip in the fall. There are a lot of $10-off each ticket promotion codes, unfortunately they can't be used to purchase 2 day tickets. SESAMEPEPSI worked for me when I researched one day tickets. Since I'm a total sucker for my little girl I went ahead and ordered reservations to the Dine With Big Bird lunch. $19.95 for adults, $15.95 for kids, I was able to use a $3-off coupon for each dining reservation with the code DINE, every little bit helps (especially since they get you again for parking, another $15 please.)

Next order of business was securing a hotel room for 4 nights. After trolling what seemed like all the standard travel sites, Priceline, Travelocity, hotels.com, I stumbled across an oft-forgotten (for me anyway) site, Hotwire.com. This site lets you know the general hotel area and its star level but doesn't let you see the exact hotel until after your credit card has been charged. Holding my breath I entered my information and chose a 3 star hotel in the Northeast Philadlephia area for only... forty-eight dollars per night! They immediately revealed my hotel, a Four Points by Sheraton about 20 minutes between Sesame Place and downtown Philly. It was a nice, family-friendly, full service hotel with a pool and a fitness center and had been fully renovated only six months prior -- a total steal for $48, the plaque on my hotel room door said it went for $229 per night, a huge savings! I'll definitely be using hotwire again, probably for a parent's only weekend. I've tried the name your own price way on priceline.com but have never had an offer accepted, I think I'll officially give up on that one.

On our first day of vacation we drove straight to our first attraction, The Academy of Natural Sciences, Philly's natural history museum. My husband and I cost only $10 each, and the little one was free. We loved this museum, after researching this place and the Franklin Institute it sounded like there were a lot more activities for toddlers and a much more economical price. We made our way through hall after hall of life-size animal dioramas, buffalo, panda, polar bears, everything looked so real, M, my daughter, loved being surprised around every corner with another huge, exotic display. We were able to spend a good two hours in their young children's area, playing in the sandbox, petting small animals and discovering fossils. The definite highlight of the natural history museum for us though was the dinosaur bone display. An entire floor of dinosaur skeletons, a T-Rex, stegosaurus, velociraptor and other huge sea dinosaurs. M and I especially enjoyed the green screen program where we got to pretend to explore a prehistoric jungle while museum goers watched on a giant projection screen.

We spent another great day at the Philadelphia Zoo. Their prices induced cringes when I first saw them on the website. $17.95 for my husband T and I, $13.95 for M and another $12 for parking. Hours of web searching failed to turn up any promotion codes or coupons, fortunately two hours before leaving our hotel I found a free parking coupon on B101radio.com, a big savings in my book. We were able to walk around the whole zoo and see every animal in about 5 hours. The children's zoo and $5 pony rides also couldn't be missed. Another highlight, the cheetah and African wild dog feedings at 1:30 pm daily. They're right next to each other and (seemingly) dangerously close to the crowd, it was very cool, but we didn't linger. We brought about 10 bottles of water and drank every last one, another big savings, the water was $2.50/bottle inside the zoo. We didn't have to eat while there, just an ice cream for the little one, a big breakfast pre-visit, a few brought from home snacks and a large dinner afterwards worked well.

We rounded out our vacation with a free afternoon visit to an amazing park, The Smith Memorial Playground. Its over 100 years old and has some of the newest playground apparatus I've ever seen. The park is famous for its giant wooden slide, a truly massive, newly renovated, wooden slide. A great opportunity for photo ops and a relaxing (free) way to end our trip.