Morning Routines at Ellis Preserve: From Hilton Garden Inn to the Walking Trails

There is a version of a Hilton Garden Inn morning at Ellis Preserve that, once you’ve done it, becomes the only way you want to start a day on the road. It runs about ninety minutes, end to end. Coffee, a walk, breakfast. Nothing more.

6:45 a.m. — A first cup

Garden Grille opens early. The first pour of coffee is poured cleanly, into a real cup, in a room that hasn’t filled yet. Take it to a window seat. Don’t open your laptop.

7:15 a.m. — Out the back

The path leaves the Hilton Garden Inn entrance and curves toward the Charles Ellis Green — a sage-soft thirteen acres at the heart of the campus, preserved exactly because it is the heart of the campus. In April and October the light here is good enough to stop a person mid-stride.

7:30 a.m. — The trail

From the Green, the walking trail runs through a wooded stretch of the preserve. A short loop is twenty minutes. A long loop is forty. There are usually deer at the eastern bend. There is almost always birdsong.

8:15 a.m. — Back to Garden Grille

By now the dining room has come alive. Order properly: eggs cooked the way you actually like them, hot sides, a second coffee. This is the meal that sets the day — a meal you would not get from a continental display, and one of the small reasons the Garden Grille name keeps coming up in guest reviews.

8:45 a.m. — The day begins

At which point you are exactly where you want to be: fed, walked, awake, and three minutes from a meeting room or thirty from a downtown Philadelphia office. The morning has done its job.

The trick to a good business trip — or a good weekend — is a morning ritual that holds up to repetition. Ellis Preserve, quietly, has one.