SUMMER 2025
The plan for this summer was to keep it simple. In absence of a major vacation, Dad bought a season pass to Sesame Place. Turns out we did take a major vacation, a six-day whirlwind trip to California including an epic day at Disneyland, fit in a couple of long weekends to Maryland and Wildwood, and explored new areas around us from Longwood Gardens to the Mercer Museum. The common theme to this summer was getting to a bunch of places that Dad has always wanted to go to - the common refrain when we went to these places was "why didn't we visit earlier?" Hopefully we return to these places again soon.
As much as we hope for Red October, Summer, as opposed to Fall, seems to be Phillies season. For Lola and Papa's anniversary, Dad treated them to a Phillies game - good seats in Section 100 behind home plate. Charlotte was into the game. Cheering and being disappointed when appropriate. Before the game we stopped at the remodeled and larger Jim's Steaks. Charlotte wowed us all with her sophistication of eating the pizza steak with a fork.
Memorial Day weekend and Dad doesn't want to do anything too crazy. We settle for watching the live action Lilo and Stitch and minigolf at Tees. Charlotte developed a brief fascination with Stitch simultaneously loving the character and pretending to be Stitch while hopping around the house and copying Stitch's antics. Tees minigolf was a warmup round before heading to the shore later this summer. Charlotte took the concept of giving yourself a good lie to an extreme, often positioning her ball with a few feet of the hole, then used her putter more like a hockey stick to guide the ball into the hole - a reverse Happy Gilmore.
Dad doesn't have many memories of Hatboro life. Most are limited to get lost in Santerians. One of his favorite memories was attending the annual June Fete. The wonderful thing about having kids is it brings back all these great memories. Is the June Fete still a thing? To dad's excitement - it is! Charlotte could see the amusement rides outside her car window and immediately became excited hoping that we'd turn into the parking lot - she may have been more excited than Dad. Maybe. We did all the basic rides, played a few games off chance, tried a funnel cake (or not in Charlotte's case). Charlotte's favorite ride? The roller coaster. No one had a bigger smile around the track than Charlotte. Dad thought "Be a Charlotte!" Will this become a summer tradition? Will need to see.
Dad declared the American Treasure Tour Museum one of the Philadelphia area's off the beaten path hidden gems. Hidden in the Oaks Convention center, this museum is more of a warehouse of all sorts of Americana from the past 100+ years. Individual a few things stood out but the Museums breadth of memorabilia is astounding. It takes a thirty-minute tram ride to see everything and you likely need a second thirty-minute ride to see everything you missed the first time. A great rainy-day activity.
To the Philadelphia Zoo! The Philadelphia Zoo is a right of passage for all area youths but count Dad, and Charlotte too I think, among those who'd rather see a museum. We had a cool encounter with a tiger that walked through a gated overpass. Otherwise the animals seemed to be taking naps. You sort of felt sorry for them. I think Charlotte had some empathy for the dreary animals too. The monkeys were fun and active. We made it to the exits before the afternoon heat arrived.
It embarrasses Dad to say this but he had never been to the Mercer Museum. Seriously how is that possible? It's a fantastic museum and made Dad feel even guiltier about not previously visiting. There's some random stuff but the museum does a phenomenal job of presenting how everyday people lived in the late 1800s. It would be like if you created a museum today with an iPhone, a laptop, etc. - boring stuff today but would provide a fascinating glimpse into how someone like you lived 100 years ago.
Father's Day brunch at La Baja in Ambler. Coffee afterwards in Wyndmoor. Dad knows the spots.
Making Dala Horses at the Conshohocken Library. Now Dad wants to visit Sweden.
One day Dad was moving Google Maps around looking for a fun place to stay along the Maryland Eastern Shore - Rock Hall. Looks awesome. June 2025 we headed down for a Thursday night. Great times. We stocked up on road trip snackies the night before. Our first stop was Chestertown where had a light breakfast and walked around the old town area.
A crazy thing happened in Rock Hall. Just as we sat down to order crabs, the power went out...in the whole town! A crazy but brief wind and rainstorm came through and knocked out power not just in Rock Hall but across the broader Delaware Valley. Long story short, we will need to return to Rock Hall again next summer to eat crabs. Prior to the power going out we had fun swimming in the pool.
We took a different route home and stopped at Mount Harmon Plantation.
Then ate lunch in Chesapeake City along the Back Creek which connects the Chesapeake Bay with the Delaware River.
Dad could not wait for the water areas of Sesame Place to open for the summer. Charlotte instantly understood why Dad was excited to have season passes. Enter the park early, splash around in the water for a few hours, leave before the park gets too crowded.
When we weren't splashing around at Sesame Place we were splashing around on the deck.
Or meeting Gritty and getting our faces painted at a Flyer's charity event. This girl can't get enough Spiderman.
Or we were cooling off at Conshohocken Sprinkler nights. The first one of the season was at Sutcliffe Park and was a truly epic event. School had just let out but families hadn't started taking their summer vacations yet so it felt like the entire community showed up to this sprinkler night. Total mayhem. Everyone knows who the last person to leave was - it had to be Charlotte Hamill.
Checked out a bar arcade in Phoenixville that wasn't a great bar or a great arcade. Eh.
No small town in the Philadelphia suburbs does fireworks like Conshohocken. It was a massive display of lights and noise. We also learned it's not a great idea to sit and watch on 7th Avenue. The township launches the fireworks in this direction. We were covered in soot and ash by the end of the event. Dad was picking ash out of his hair a few days later.
We celebrated the 4th of July at Karen Schmidt's house. Fun times. Great, and I mean GREAT, food.
Phanatic Beach Towel give away at the Phillies game today. We must go. Took the train into town. Then the subway to the game.
While waiting for the train ride home Charlotte ran through City Hall's fountains. Good thing we had a Phanatic towel.
Another Thursday night get-a-way. This time for Lola's birthday. We spent the night at the Penn's Landing Hilton. We had the indoor pool all to ourselves.
And we sort of had all of Penn's Landing to ourselves too. It was dead down here.
The next day we took the ferry over to Camden's Adventure Aquarium. The stars of this aquarium are Button and Genny - two giant hippos - and if you show up when the aquarium opens and head right to their tank, you'll be there near feeding time when they are both active. We loved the aquarium - it seemed much more active and livelier than a zoo. Dad's already planning a trip to Baltimore in 2026.
After school / work trip to Sesame Place. This is the best time to visit. If we lived closer, say fifteen minutes away, we would have been here every weeknight.
The Hoffmaster Campout un-officially serves as our mid-summer event. All of Dad's relatives on Lola's side gather at Aunt Connie, David John, and Mandy's for a three-day weekend of swimming, camping, and eating. Charlotte was excited to spend a night in a tent, even testing out the experience before night fall.
It's been wonderful watching Charlotte's pool "progression" over the years. Going from being pushed around in an inflatable at six months to paddling to jump off the diving board for the first time with dad waiting to catch her in the pool to "JUMP!" as she grabbed her nose and jumped into the pool, without dad to catch her, swam to the side, got out of the pool, and ran right back to the diving board. Dad stopped counting after fifty jumps off the diving board.
After the campout we took a trip to California to visit Charlotte's cousins which included a day at Disneyland. Full details here: California - July 2025.

Our first weekend back from California was a high class weekend. On Saturday afternoon we had a tea party in the kitchen. All of Charlotte's stuffed animals attended. That got dad to thinking - we should go for a real tea party tomorrow. On Sunday we started early at Longwood Gardens. Charlotte always dresses appropriately for the occasions. Dad enjoyed the gardens and thought that if we lived closer, he'd get a season pass and read a book on a weekend morning and enjoy the garden's serenity. We did a garden loop and watched the fountain show.
Afternoon tea at a Taste of Britain in Wayne. Charlotte loved the experience if not the actual tea itself. Dad wound up drinking several kettles of teas and ate almost all of the mini-sandwiches. Even the deserts were a bit too "sophisticated" for Charlotte. It was still a great experience and will need to keep this place top of mind for a future visit when we need to make a quick trip across the pond.
Another sprinkler night, this time at Mary Wood Park. Scoops ice cream afternoon. Great Tuesday in Conshy.
Knowing we had a trip to Wildwood on the horizon we spent a Saturday in Doylestown which included two hours running around Kids Castle.
Dad had been wanting to go to Wildwood for a while and as soon as we arrived he regretted not visiting earlier. The entire town is vibe - the doo wop architecture takes you back in time and immediately puts you in vacation mode. Jersey Shore trips stopped feeling like a get-a-way several years ago - Dad has sort of not look forward to the Jersey Shore, feeling like the vacations had become a bit mundane. Enter Wildwood. It felt like coming to the Jersey Shore for the first time all over again.
We rented a surrey and rode up and down the boardwalk.
We ate lots of great food at Hooked Up Seafood (look at Charlotte go straight for the crab claws), Mack's Pizza, and Sam's Pizza Palace - we are much bigger fans of Sam's than Mack's although only place we'd definitely return to is Hooked Up Seafood - those Chowder Fries!
Charlotte was ready to go to the beach with her new beach toys and scary boogie board.
At night we went to the boardwalk. Wildwood as a boardwalk tram that we rode back and forth to Morey's Piers. Charlotte is the bravest three-and-a-half year old I've ever met. No ride was too scary for her. The only thing that could stop her was exhaustion. Too much fun finally caught up to her at the end of the night.
We stayed at the Caribbean Hotel - a national historic hotel and one of Wildwood's best example of preserved doo wop architecture. From the online photos, we couldn't tell if we'd be staying at a place that hadn't been renovated since the 1950s or had been recently renovated to look like the 1950s. Fortunately it was the latter. We spent quite a bit of time chilling at the hotel and enjoying the pool.
Two Wildwood Vids:
We returned from Wildwood but the fun continued with another splash night at Sutcliffe Park and more Scoops.
There's a Legoland ten minutes from our house and Dad has wavered going here on many a rainy and cold day - how much fun could Legoland really be? Immediately after passing through admissions you hop on a laser tag type right, very similar to the Buzz Lightyear ride at Disneyland, although a much weaker version. We got off the ride and it was like, I hope there's more to this than that.
And there was. Legoland had different "zones" from a pirate area to a ninja area to a town area. After the lackluster opening ride, everything we did was fun. We wound up spending over two hours here playing with Legos, watching 4D videos with wind and rain, and taking in all the impressive Lego builds. Legoland was similar to the Crayola Factory side in Easton, not quite as impressive, but not an hour-and-a-half away either.
The Philadelphia cityscapes were impressive in both size and attention to detail.
Labor Day Weekend we went up to New Hope - with hundreds of others. Fortunately, we were able to escape the crowds and enjoy a quiet lunch at the Narrows.
On Labor Day we went to Sesame Place. I said before that Charlotte is the bravest three-and-a-half year old I know, and here she is again showing her bravery. We had to ride in the front car of the roller coaster. Every time. Didn't matter that there was an additional 15-minute wait for the front car, it was the only car that Charlotte would ride in. She got her face painted. We met Cookie Monster. Then we ate a khachapuri. What a day. What a summer.