At various tourist attractions, open food and drink are generally prohibited. But as for a plastic-wrapped hoagie ...

At the Liberty Bell, guard Delroy Morris advised: "You can bring it, but you can't eat it. "

At the Constitution Center, a guard laid down the rules. "You can sit on a bench and eat it." And since no one investigated the hoagie's traveling bag, it sat through a multimedia presentation and wandered among statues of the document's signers.

At Independence Hall, so venerable that the National Park Service shut down a street to protect it, the hoagie sailed through security . Although it couldn't be opened in any of the buildings, guard Darlene Butler said the grounds were a different matter.

So there, on a bench near where Jefferson and Hamilton may once have eaten, the hoagie was consumed.

The presidential hoagie

A 10-inch Wawa roast beef hoagie, $4.39. Lettuce, tomatoes, onion, oregano, pepper.

At the first security checkpoint entering the federal check-printing plant that the President was visiting in Northeast Philadelphia, a uniformed federal officer frisked the human, looked in the briefcase and said, "You got your sandwich."

He ran a metal-detecting wand over the bag but did not open the paper wrapper.

At a second checkpoint, the human went through a metal detector, but not the hoagie. Another federal officer looked in the briefcase, saw the hoagie, and cracked, "Ah, we found it," then laughed and let it through.

As Bush gave his speech, the hoagie reclined in its briefcase about 30 yards away - well within field-goal range.

The airport hoagie

Italian-with-oil, $4.50, by Randy's Mini-Mart, Linfield, Montgomery County.

Not only is the eatery within the emergency zone around the Limerick nuclear power plant, it's also nearly in the shadow of the cooling towers.

A saleswoman said employees come in all the time, buy hoagies, and take them back to the plant, apparently in violation of no security rule, although an Exelon spokesman declined to comment.

Later, at Philadelphia International Airport, of the five guards on hand for X-ray scrutiny of a pair of shoes, a jacket, a purse, and the briefcase with the hoagie, not one balked.

Ticketed on a 12:20 p.m. US Airways flight to Boston, it headed to gate C29, where an attendant said the airline had no problem with people bringing food - smelly hoagies included - onto the plane.

"This is not a meal flight," she said. So it's BYOF - or BYOH.

It's not as if the airport doesn't sell its own. At Philly Steak and Hoagie Co. in the food court, Terrance Fleming said they sell scads ($5.25 for an Italian, "a Philadelphia tradition done right.")

Back in a car, the hoagie traveled past - not into - Lincoln Field, then to Camden.