Wednesday, June 8, 2011

Chicago!

After enjoying a wonderful day at Churchill downs on Friday, Saturday morning came bright and early as we had to catch a 6 am flight to Chicago. We got in to Chicago about 6 am because of the time change. We went to our hotel and luckily they had a room ready so we put our bags in and then went to the train station. We spent a lot of time on those trains. It took about 30 minutes to get to downtown Chicago. But we had a pretty nice hotel for a lot cheaper than being downtown so it was worth the ride.

Our first stop was the Field Museum! This dinosaur is Lucy. :)



Our next stop, the Adler Planetarium. It was pretty cool! The big thing Rory is standing in front of us is the Atwood Sphere. It was built in 1913. It's almost 100 years old! You can see in the bottom right hand corner there are people sitting in a big metal box thing. Once everyone is in it moves up into the sphere and there is a planetarium inside. They show you the constellations and talk to you about them.

Outside the planetarium.

This was the cool view of the Chicago skyline you could see from the planetarium.

Our last stop of the day was the Shedd Aquarium. It was packed with people and we were really tired. But the exhibits were really cool. Here we are looking at a sweet frog.

We were there on the last day of their big jellyfish exhibit. It was pretty neat seeing all of the different kinds of jellyfish. Here are a couple really cool pictures we took.


To finish off our day in the city Mike found some good reviews for a pizza place called Giordano's. Come to find out it's one of the best places to get deep dish pizza in the city. Rory took the leftover pizza to work for lunch and he had some very jealous co-workers. The pizza was delicious. They recommended we get the pizza with green peppers, onions, canadian bacon, and mushrooms. And boy did it have a lot of cheese. The toppings were in between two large layers of cheese. Yummy! :) It was pretty intense. I was proud to get through one slice!


Day two started at Millenium Park. Right before we got there I made a quick pit stop at Walgreens to pick up another umbrella because it looked like it was going to pour. The day before Rory and I got caught with one umbrella and that wasn't so fun.

The Bean! This was really cool to see and a lot of fun to take pictures by.

While we were at the Bean it began to rain. So we pulled out our umbrellas and continued walking around the park. And then the downpour began. Boy was I happy I had my own umbrella. I was getting wet enough even with my own. We found an information office and ducked inside quick to see if the rain would calm down and rethink our plan for the day. After a little it seemed to have calmed down a little so we ventured out to get a bus to Navy Pier. Along the way we stopped at Dunkin' Donuts for a quick hot chocolate. :)

Navy Pier was a lot of fun to walk around. Part of it was inside which was nice when it was raining. But the rain did let up off and on so we could enjoy the outside as well. There was a cool ferris wheel you could ride and get a great view of the city. Too bad it wasn't running because of the rain.

When we got to Navy Pier we couldn't see the city skyline because of the thick fog. After another rain it cleared up! We were glad we could finally get a picture.

After the Navy Pier it was time for lunch. We took a bus trying to go to the Magnificent Mile to find a local restaurant. We got off the bus and it was raining really hard so we just found a little restaurant and stopped there. It wasn't local food, but it was really good just the same. Below I am running across the street to the restaurant trying to not get even more wet!

After lunch we found the Magnificent Mile and began walking along the street. Luckily it had finally stopped raining. We stopped at the Hershey's store for a bit.

This is a water tower. It is one of the few buildings that survived the huge fire that destroyed most of Chicago.

At the end of our walk we came to the John Hancock Tower (aka the Sear's Tower). We were really hoping it wouldn't be too foggy that we wouldn't be able to see anything.

Luckily it wasn't foggy at all! We had a great view off the whole city!



We had a great view of the Navy Pier as well. It's the skinny strip of land covered in white buildings.

This is how Rory and I spent most of our trips back to the hotel on the train. We were drained by the end of the day and sitting there for 30 minutes puts you to sleep. :)

We had a blast visiting Chicago. The rain tried to ruin our trip, but luckily we still got to do everything we wanted. I may have spent most of the time with soggy shoes and wet pants, but it was worth it! Hopefully we'll get a chance to visit again sometime and visit Wrigley Field!

1 comment:

  1. I have only been to Chicago once for a day - but we LOVED it! Too bad the bean wasn't there back then tho :( Guess I'll just have to go back. The Ferris wheel on Navy Pier is awesome! From the ground you would never guess how high up you get - but it is VERY HIGH!

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