So the story continues…

We had to be in the Philidelphia hostel by 12am, otherwise we couldn’t check in, so we thought 5 hours should be long enough to get to the hostel. But things never went as smoothly as we liked.

One significant error we made was by catching a greyhound bus instead of a chinatown one which would have been cheaper and got us to Philidelphia much quicker. We arrived about an hour and a bit later than expected, about 11:10pm which still gave us about 50 minutes to get to the hostel. The hostel was quite far from the greyhound station so we got a cab for the quickest and simplest solution. We thought we had a vast amount of time to get to the hostel, but it didn’t look hopeful when we saw the cab driver relying on his GPS.

As time went on, we were still sitting in the cab. We noticed that the cab driver seemed to miss a junction which was not good news as we were already running out of time. I was starring at the GPS system to see if the driver’s error caused us to be further from the hostel when suddenly a strange noise started at the rear right side of the car. Yes, we got a flat tyre! By now it was about 11:40pm and we had lost most hope of getting to the hostel in time until the cab driver raised our hopes again by attempting to change the tyre.

We was very optimistic again that we could make it if he could change it in time. We were even grabbing our torches to provide him with light to change the tyre as it was pretty dark where we was. Then, just when you think things can’t get much worse, the cab driver mumbled “we have a bit of a problem…” We looked down at the wheel and could see the driver pointlessly figuring out how to get the tool which loosen the nuts on the wheel to fit on properly. The tool the driver had was the wrong size and did not fit on the nuts of the wheel which meant he could not get the tyre off the car!! You cannot imagine how frustrated and annoyed we was at the cab driver. It was late at night with the prospect of sleeping rough for the night. It was not a happy moment.

It was about 11:50pm and we was in the middle of nowhere. The cab driver who seemed a little dodgy was going crazy on the phone. Clearly, he was getting nowhere and he coudn’t do anything to get out of this mess. Moments later, we received a gift from the gods! We were saved when Kev saw another cab appear in the distance which was a rare occurance on this road, of which we managed to flag down and get us into the hostel just in time!

Tired as we were, we managed to check in and locate our beds to recover and re-energise for another round of hectic sightseeing the next day.