The Zoo!

I love the zoo! A couple Saturdays ago Rory and I decided to check out the Louisville Zoo. Besides the fact that it was really hot, it was a lot of fun!

Here's Rory with some pretty cool Rhinos.

The giraffes wouldn't come close for a better picture. But they were still fun to watch.

These elephants were a lot of fun to watch. They can do so much with their trunks. It's pretty amazing.

I wish I could remember what this animal was called. But they had really cool curvy horns so we had to take a picture. :)

The arctic part of the zoo was really cool. They had a lot of props and different scenery things set up to make it seem like you were in the arctic. This polar bear was doing a little dance. For as long as we watched him he kept walking forwards around the corner and disappear and then he would walk backwards into view. It was pretty funny to watch.

We also saw some really cool sea lions and a seal. We got to watch while the trainers came out and worked with them. After the sea lion show we were pretty tired and hot so we called it a day. We didn't see all of the animals or shows we wanted to so I guess we'll have to go back again! :) But the ones we saw were great! We had an awesome time!

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!

Churchill Downs

To begin our fun Memorial Day weekend we spent Friday afternoon at the races! Rory's parents flew in the night before and Rory had a half day off of work on Friday so we got tickets to go to Churchill Downs and sit on Millionaires Row! We had a blast!

We got there around 2 and the first race started at 2:45. So we had time to walk around a bit before the races began.

We had a little fun in the gift shop trying on hats.

Then we headed up to Millionaires Row to enjoy our buffet lunch. We were starving and ready to eat! The food was great.

We were just finishing up as the trumpet sounded to announce the horses were coming onto the track. So we went out to the balcony to watch!

Since we don't bet we decided we needed to come up with some kind of betting system amongst ourselves with no money involved. So to start out the day we each had 20 points. We could bet however many points on however many horses we wanted to. Then if we picked the winning horse we would get the points we bet on them multiplied by what the odds were for the horse to win. Sounds kind of complicated, but it wasn't too bad. :)

None of us picked the winning horse on the first race. But I won the second race! I picked Fresh Ice who came in first! He was a gorgeous gray horse. He's in the picture below. He's number 6. The #2 horse also in the picture was Polly's pick and he came in second!

In between a couple of the races we went down to the paddocks to see the horses before they raced. They are the most beautiful horses.

We had a lot of fun watching the races and seeing all of these gorgeous horses. By the end of the day Mike had the most points. Rory and I didn't do so well. After I won the second race I thought I might have a shot, but it was all down hill from there. But we had a lot of fun and would love to do it again!