My new book Getting Into Guinness, was released by Harper Collins on September 16th, and ever since, my life has been a frenzy of radio interviews, plus the occasional book signing and television appearance. This activity, in turn has taken me places I might never otherwise go-- like Philadelphia!

Philly is a great tourist town, and I can’t say why I haven’t been in about 15 years, other than that I grew up in New York and went to school in Washington, D.C., and always just sort of took it for granted. But its attractions are many, and packed into a very user friendly pedestrian downtown. From one of the world’s greatest art museums (and for film fans, the steps Sylvester Stallone ran up while training as Rocky) to an American Icon, the Liberty Bell, downtown is full of tourist sights worth seeing.

As travelers, we do a lot of whining about how great certain places were 10 years ago—before Starbucks served Paris, before Louis Vuitton outfitted Beijing, and before cell-phone towers connected the summit of Mt. Kilimanjaro to the rest of the world.

But while I was visiting Boston this weekend, I was struck not only by how much the city has changed in the past decade, but by how much better it is today. When I first went there 10 years ago, the Big Dig was in full swing: cranes dominated the skyline; displaced rats ran rampant; and construction sites isolated the city’s most historic neighborhoods from each other.

Photo courtesy of IgoUgo member zabelle