PHILADELPHIA—Hitched outside the Liberty Bell pavilion Saturday, DaVinci took a nice toothy munch out of a carrot thick enough to be a baseball bat.
DaVinci is a horse and doesn't pay attention to what the elephants and donkeys in Washington do about the federal budget.
So the news that Congress and President Barack Obama had managed to avert a shutdown of the federal government just before a midnight deadline didn't mean much to him.
Nor did he appear to care whether Independence Hall and the Liberty Bell would be shut. They would have been deemed non-essential and closed, along with a host of other federal government services.
DaVinci's driver, Camilla Beuchat, wasn't sure how she felt about that prospect.
"At first I thought that maybe if the buildings were closed, more people would go on a carriage ride," said Beuchat, of South Philadelphia. "But then again, they might not come down here at all."
Visitors to Independence Historical National Park were relieved, perhaps no one more so than history teacher Tammy Hart, who brought 240 eighth-graders and their parents on a bus trip from Helen, Md.
"It was pretty stressful," she said, describing days of anxious discussions with the tour company. She went to bed Friday night not knowing what would happen and woke up at 2 a.m. to check.
Parents were also relieved. Sharon Young and her husband, Mark, both work for the Defense Department— and both of them would have been out of work.
"It was a little unnerving because I haven't gone through anything like this," said Young, who accompanied her son Sean, 14, on the trip. "I'm not pleased for our government."
Friday's late-night negotiating in Washington may have saved the trip for Tammy Hart and her students, but it didn't help a Center City hotel, which lost $86,000 worth of business when organizers last week canceled a government conference scheduled for this week.
"That's a good chunk of change for a hotel to be losing, plus we're coming back from a rough couple of years," said Ed Grose, director of the Greater Philadelphia Hotel Association.
"We're just crawling back and we can't afford this kind of hit," said Grose, who would not say which hotel lost the booking.
Visiting from Australia, Joanne Rogers, her husband, Terry, and their two children, Patrick, 11, and Jacqui, 9, didn't know what to make of the news. Besides Independence park, they planned to see the Statue of Liberty and Grand Canyon national parks.
"We thought it was quite strange that something like this could happen," Joanne Rogers said of the threatened government shutdown.
In Australia, the family explained, the entire government leadership would resign to be replaced by the governor general, who would take over until a new election could be held.
"That's only happened twice in our history," Terry Rogers said.
It's also happened in our history, said park ranger Jane Storsteen, a historical interpreter at the Liberty Bell.
But, when it happened in Massachusetts and in Virginia just before the Revolutionary War, the colonists weren't quite as sanguine about the situation. The British "came over and shut the colonial governments down," she said.
"Our ports are shut," Storsteen said, paraphrasing a letter that Abigail Adams, the "second first lady" wrote to a friend in England. "Our commerce is ruined."
Some of Philadelphia's commerce was ruined, but there was little evidence of it on Saturday. Business boomed Friday as tourists got their visits in early in case the government shut down.
Matt McNamee, the assistant manager at a souvenir shop in the Bourse, said he was barely aware of the situation.
"It would have been bad for business, but we would have been open," he said. "Nobody was stressing."
Distributed by McClatchy-Tribune Information Services.