East Mt. Pleasant and Boyer

My daughter's house in the Mt. Airy section of Philadelphia is on the busy corner of East Mt. Pleasant Avenue and Boyer Street. It's one of the few uninterrupted cross streets in the neighborhood that runs from the Cheltenham Avenue shopping area through Mt. Airy and on to Lincoln Drive and the connector to the expressway to downtown so it gets a fair amount of traffic. It is also a bus route. I like sitting on the porch watching the world go by.

One day last fall I was sitting there when this praying mantis came by and hung out with me for awhile. She moved about on the porch railing and then slowly climbed up the column to the porch roof. She was a momentary distraction from the traffic and the people going by on the sidewalk. She was also a distraction for Henry.

It's a busy intersection. There are people waiting for the bus on that corner. It's a bus that I rode many times when I was growing up in Germantown. I sometimes rode that bus up to Cedarbrook Mall which was one of the first malls in the area back in the early 60's. I went by that corner many times. An interesting thing about riding the buses now is the phone apps that people have that tell them when the bus will arrive on their corner using a GPS mapping system. Select your bus and you can see it moving along the map. People arrive at the bus stop just before the bus arrives and you can see them checking their phone for the progress of the bus. I put the SEPTA public transportation app for Philly on my phone so I could follow the progress of the commuter trains while we were visiting.

I liked sitting on their porch in the afternoon with a book. There were people constantly working by. It felt like home. They live in a very walkable neighborhood. The train station is a couple of blocks away in one direction and Germantown Avenue is just a couple of blocks the other way. Both attract a lot of people walking by their house. We love that they are close to the avenue where there are lots of bars, restaurants, stores, shops, cafes, the library, playgrounds, the supermarket.  There is also a nice brewery. Lot's to do there in the evenings after being with the kids all day. Well, up until the pandemic that is.

We were fortunate to have some time there in October. We had been planning to go down for Thanksgiving but that didn't work out. We can't get wait to get down there again during the coming year. Hopefully in the late spring we will have been vaccinated.