At Home with Kristi

Sunday we started off with a great breakfast in the cafe attached to the hotel, E.Leaven.

Then we headed over to Jewel Osco market to pick up transit passes. Passes in hand we headed to the subway , on our merry way to the Museum of Science and Industry.  We got off the subway and walked a couple of blocks to our bus stop.

Did I mention it was cold as satan’s heart on Sunday?  34 degrees with wind up to 35mph to be exact.

So we get to our bus stop, dodging the marathon runners who were crazy enough to be running the Shamrock marathon that morning.  At the bus stop there are a few people already there.  We wait about 10 minutes for the bus to come, rejoicing as we see it pulling up.  Only to have the people at the stop before us wave it on because they were marathon runners who didn’t realize they were standing at the bus stop and obviously had no idea that we had been standing right next to them for 10 minutes talking about the bus schedule!

(insert expletives here)

So we start walking.  And we walked. And walked.  And walked. Did I mention it was cold? and were not wearing winter coats?

So finally, in the distance we see the Field Museum.  Change of plans, lets go there.  Oh, its so far, its so cold! Trudge. trudge, trudge. 

Finally, into the warmth!

We had bought Go Chicago discount cards (3 day ones) which is supposed to let us skip the lines into the attractions, which worked fine when the ticket people knew how to use them.  Anyway, into the museum.  (It took 15 minutes for the feeling to come back in my thighs).

The Fields Museum is cool, we didn’t even see 1/3 of it though.

Matthew was impressed at how big gorilla actually are

We saw this

And got shrunk to the size of bugs

Saw some bugs

Saw these creepy things

And this CREEPY thing

LOTS of stuffed dead things

and of course, Sue

Tired and hungry we left and went to a late lunch/early dinner (linner) at the Grand Lux Cafe, where again we got to skip the line and got seated right away.  Great food and fabulous  decor

and cheesecake

After eating Jen and I walked to the Ghiradelli store and the Hershey store while Mark went to Redbox to rent the Twilight New Moon movie

I got Matthew a present, he liked it

Later that evening we headed down to Big Bowl for some food.  Jen is on a low sugar diet, so ordered a “special” curry.  It was so hot our eyes were watering across the table

We then went back to the hotel and watched the movie on the laptop (again, note to self, bring av cable next time)

to be continued….

We’ve been trying the past couple years to do a bit more traveling together.  Last May we went to Memphis for a short vacation (see that post on my old blog which I haven’t transferred over yet)

This past weekend we drove up to Chicago.  Matt’s sister Jennifer and her husband Mark flew down from Minneapolis and met us there.

The drive up was fine, but boring. It was windy and cold, snowing by the time we got to Midway.

I had gotten a great deal on rooms at the Four Points Sheraton, one block off Michigan Avenue downtown.  The hotel staff there was some of the nicest I have ever encountered, and I’ve stayed at a lot of hotels.

Once we got settled in the hotel it was dinner time.  Jen and I had read about “priority seating” passes you could get from the hotel front desk for Gino’s East, where we planned on eating.  We stopped at the front desk and they gave us one.  We walked the 3 blocks to Gino’s in the snow and icy wind to find a line of about 20 people standing outside.  We gave the person at the door our priority pass and were seated within 10 minutes!

We enjoyed our first taste of real chicago deep dish pizza.

After eating we went back to the hotel and watched a movie on Matt’s laptop.  (note to self, bring av cable next time so we can hook laptop up to tv and not watch movie that small and soft)

That was the extent of day 1 in Chicago, it was too cold and nasty to go out and do anything else.

To be continued….