Philadelphia is a combination of two Greek words: love (phileo) and brother (adelphos) and known as the city of brotherly love. The city’s founder, William Penn, hoped it would become place where freedom would ring and it is the home of the Liberty Bell.
Jen, Barb and Lisa at LBBC Butterfly Ball 2022
I lived in Philly when I went to the University of Pennsylvania for college. I often return to visit my roommate and join her at the annual fundraiser for Living Beyond Breast Cancer.
The 2022 Living Beyond Breast Cancer Butterfly Ball honored and celebrated five amazing women who are changing conversations about cancer. Together, we raised over $1 million in support of LBBC’s key programs of providing both trusted information and a community of support.
Over 100 years ago, the City Hall Annex was built and the people of Philadelphia went to this government facility for over seventy years to get official documents notarized and it is listed on the National Registry of Historic Places. Now a luxury hotel in the Autograph Collection which opened in 2019 showcasing its historic architecture and modern amenities, The Notary Hotel stamps a custom seal on your paperwork on arrival. In the grand lobby full of books, art and enormous arches, there is a display case showcasing typewriters from the 1920s. The dressers in each room are made from historic notary cabinets used in the original building. This is my favorite location in Center City and close to Love Park, The Liberty Bell and Rittenhouse Square for incredible dining choices. My suite had a stunning view of City Hall and the evening lights.
I walked from the hotel to PENN campus to talk to students about a career in journalism and then used the speedy wifi on property to participate in a ZOOM talk with my 1989 classmates about our travel expertise.
The museums and art collections in Philadelphia are outstanding and I did a television segment about visiting Philly for KTLA TV in Los Angeles. I highly recommend the National Constitution Center, the Betsy Ross House, the Barnes Museum and the Museum of the American Revolution. There is so much to do–you will need more than one visit.
Explore Philly with me:
Flying to Philly and home to Los Angeles
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Lisa Ellen Niver is an award-winning travel expert who has explored 102 countries and six continents. A graduate of the University of Pennsylvania, she worked on cruise ships for seven years and backpacked for three years in Asia. She is the founder of the website WeSaidGoTravel which is read in 235 countries and was named #3 on Rise Global’s top 1,000 Travel Blogs. Niver is a speaker at the Los Angeles, New York, Chicago and Dallas Travel and Adventure Shows for 2023. Her podcast, “Make Your Own Map,” has been watched in more than 11 countries on 4 continents. Niver is represented by Chip MacGregor of MacGregor Literary, Inc. Look for her memoir in Fall 2023 from Post Hill Press/Simon and Schuster.
You can find Lisa Niver talking travel on broadcast television at KTLA TV Los Angeles, Satellite Media Tours, The Jet Set TV and Orbitz travel webisodes as well as her YouTube channel, where her WeSaidGoTravel videos have nearly 2 million views.
With more than 150,000 followers across social media, she has hosted Facebook Live for USA Today 10best, is verified on Twitter and listed on IMDb, and is the Social Media Manager for the Los Angeles Press Club.
As a journalist, Niver has interviewed Deepak Chopra, Olympic medalists, and numerous bestselling authors and been invited to both the Oscars and the United Nations. She has been a judge for the Gracie Awards for the Alliance of Women in Media, and has run 15 travel competitions on her website, publishing over 2,500 writers and photographers from 75 countries.
For her print and digital stories as well as her television segments, she has been awarded three Southern California Journalism Awards and two National Arts and Entertainment Journalism Awards and been a finalist twenty times.
Niver has published more than 2000 articles, in more than three dozen magazines and journals
including National Geographic, Wired, Teen Vogue, HuffPost Personal, POPSUGAR, Ms. Magazine, Luxury Magazine, Smithsonian, Sierra Club, Saturday Evening Post, AARP, AAA Explorer Magazine, American Airways, Delta Sky, enRoute (Air Canada), Hemispheres, Jewish Journal, Myanmar Times, BuzzFeed, Robb Report, Scuba Diver Life, Ski Utah, Trivago, Undomesticated, USA Today, TODAY, Wharton Magazine, and Yahoo.
https://bit.ly/m/lisaniver
Awards
National Arts and Entertainment Journalism Awards
2021 Winner: Book Critic: Ms. Magazine “Untamed: Brave Means Living From the Inside Out”
2019 Winner: Soft News Feature for Film/TV: KTLA TV “Oscars Countdown to Gold with Lisa Niver”
2019 Finalist for: Soft News, Business/Music/Tech/Art
Southern California Journalism Awards
2022 Finalist: Book Criticism
2021 Winner: Technology Reporting
2021 Finalist: Book Criticism
2020 Winner: Print Magazine Feature: Hemispheres Magazine, “Painter by the Numbers, Rembrandt”
2020 Finalist: Online Journalist of the Year, Activism Journalism, Educational Reporting, Broadcast Lifestyle Feature
2019 Finalist: Broadcast Television Lifestyle Segment for “Ogden Ski Getaway”
2018 Finalist: Science/Technology Reporting, Travel Reporting, Personality Profile
2017 Winner: Print Column “A Journey to Freedom over Three Passovers”
Social Media Presence
YouTube Channel: We Said Go Travel (1.7 million views)
Short form video:TikTok, Instagram Reels, Facebook Reels, YouTube Shorts
Twitter: lisaniver (90,000 followers)
Instagram: lisaniver (24,000 followers)
Pinterest: We Said Go Travel (20,000 followers and over 70,000 monthly views)
Facebook: lisa.niver (5,000 followers); We Said Go Travel (3,000 followers)
LinkedIn: lisaellenniver (9000 contacts)
