I left Atlantic City on the bus - from Bally's casino after the lady at the Greyhound station told me it started there and if it was full when it got to the bus terminal I wouldn't get on. So I had walked down there and joined the relevant queue. After a few minutes I noticed something and turned around to confirm it and, yep, I was the token white guy in the queue. It was like a negative version of a movie featuring a token black guy in order to appear politically correct. And, of course, being a Greyhound bus, one of the women in the queue, while dressed quite well, was acting crazy - giggling to herself, occasionally talking to someone who wasn't there, and sipping something from a can in a brown paper bag. I stayed well away from her and avoided all eye contact.

The journey from Atlantic City to Philadelphia wasn't very long and, once there, I found the hostel with no problem but it wasn't open yet. It is the first hostel I've come across on this trip that has a kick-out policy - from 10:30am to 4:30pm everyone is locked out. I've been to other hostels where there is no member of staff for those hours but they give the guests a door code to be able to get in. I had to wait until 4:30pm because there had been no availability on the internet but after I phoned them they said I should be able to get a bed if I turned up early, so I made sure I was there bang on 4:30. They were right because after me there was steady trickle of people turning up and it got very full.

The hostel itself was in the bottom two that I've stayed in. For starters it's right opposite a club and this isn't across a normal American city road of four lanes and two sidewalks. No, this is more of a side street that has one lane and a couple of narrow pavements. And I stayed Friday and Saturday nights when the club was obviously very active. The hostel had a 2am curfew that a few people grumbled about but I had no problem with it. Again this is unusual because you normally get a door code to get in 24 hours a day.

The other thing that made it bad was that the dorm was one enormous room with about 26 beds in it, and of all those beds I happened to be adjacent to Snoring Guy, the one who snored at top volume for the entire night and morning. However my placement didn't matter because it bothered everybody that I spoke to.

Out in Philadelphia itself it didn't take me long to get round the historical sights. I did a very good guided walking tour past 20 historical sights. The kinds of things here are to do with the creation of the Declaration Of Independence and US Constitution. If Boston had been about the fighting of the Revolution, then Philadelphia had been about the boring paperwork side of it. I went inside Independence Hall and saw where the Declaration Of Independence had been discussed, voted on and read to the people. And I saw an original draft copy of it, along with a draft copy of the US Constitution, which are a few days older than the signed copies. That was quite cool.

Outside the historical world of Philly I went over to the Philadelphia Museum of Art and saw the steps that Sylvester Stallone ran up in the movie Rocky. I didn't run up them but I still got to the top quickly and easily, avoiding the Armenian genocide rally going on there, having already dodged the anti-Scientology demonstrators earlier on.

Despite the hostel ranking very lowly in my eyes I had a fantastic time there because I met a whole bunch of people and we went out for dinner on the second evening, all seven of us, who had just met. I had a blast that night. But then came the blessing-curse nature of travelling, because I had to leave the next day. So as quickly as I had gained some new friends I, and some of the others, were going our separate ways and losing them. But then it's on to the next place and meeting more random people.