We began our Chicago adventure with a trip to Shedd Aquarium.
The penguins were my favorite.
We met a college friend and her daughter at the Brookfield Zoo. I remember going to Brookfield Zoo as a child and enjoyed going down memory lane. Here is a zebra we found posing for a picture.
Gino's East pizza is soooo good! There was a line out the door to get into the place and each deep dish pizza can take up to an hour to cook but boy was it worth the wait!
Below is the horse (Virgil) and carriage from our downtown carriage ride. Virgil is old for a horse and has a mind of his own. I guess it takes a special person to lead him to pull the carriage. Our driver told us a driver had quit once because Virgil stopped in the middle of an intersection and refused to go! Virgil gave us a very nice ride around the city and luckily didn't stop in the middle of any intersections. We enjoyed the nice surprise of good timing as we went by Navy Pier just in time to see the fireworks as we rode along.
We enjoyed visiting Millennium Park. Here is the "Cloud Gate", a piece of interactive art that reflects the city skyline. I loved people watching. Observers of all ages would begin looking in the giant "mirror" then would make faces, jump, take pictures and point in amazement. We noticed it was quite the place for wedding parties. We watched three different wedding parties arrive to have wedding pictures taken with the "bean".
I enjoyed watching this site at Millennium Park. It appeared to be a father and daughter painting a city scene. The special part to me was that they were painting it together.
After our visit to Millennium Park, we walked to Macy's on State Street (old Marshall Field's) to have lunch at the Walnut Room. I was so excited about our visit as my second cousin is part of Macy's Culinary Council and I'd discovered she had something special featured on the menu-blueberry lemonade! Unfortunately, the one item unavailable that day was you guessed it, blueberry lemonade. The replacement was a white peach lemonade so I ordered it instead. The Walnut Room was beautiful and the food was quite good. Below is a picture of the Culinary Council displayed at the entrance to the walnut room. My cousin is in the back row, the third from the left. This Macy's still had the old look and ambiance of the old Marshall Fields store. It felt like we were walking into quite the historical place.
We ended our trip with a double decker bus tour of downtown. My feet were very much saying "no more" to any walking at this point so this was a great way to still be a tourist and sit down, too (Speaking of walking, I had to laugh when I was walking through the city and an older gentleman with a cane was quickly able to pass me by). Below is a picture of our wonderful tour guide. He did such a nice job of being entertaining while sharing Chicago history, trivia, and downtown "site" information. He would often break out in song with a variety of Chicago tunes.
-Another interesting part of our trip was when we were on our way to a favorite tapas restaurant and we noticed stopped traffic a block from where we were attempting to turn. Many people were out of their cars taking pictures and watching. Police were everywhere. We looked their direction and saw a very, very long motorcade of police and SUV's. We knew whoever it was must be important. C said "I wonder if Obama is in town." He checked his phone later and yes, Obama was in town for four hours to do some fundraising events.
-It was nice to get away for a bit and do some fun touristy kind of stuff together before baby arrives.
-I must admit that after having lots of fun away in the big city, it was also nice to come back home to small town life. I prefer the traffic here much better. C is such a good driver in Chicago traffic. I only had to cover my eyes a couple of times. : ) I felt I'd really been to Chicago when I got to experience the rush hour traffic of horn honking and cars flying here and there and everywhere!
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