Chicago- Sunday, June 25th, 2017

     A few years ago, Julie came to Chicago with a group of teachers for a conference about "Learning Communities."  They took some time while they were here to go to quite a few tourist sites too, and Julie has been talking about bringing the family back to them ever since then.  Our first stop this morning was to retrace a few of her stops.

     We got up a little early, but we're still basically running with our internal clocks on Eastern time. We were able take a leisurely time getting around today.  We ate breakfast in the hotel, and didn't have any traffic problems, and still got to Navy Pier by 9:00.  Things don't really open there until 10:00, but we still enjoyed walking down the pier and getting our bearings.  Navy Pier itself is a long pier that was actually used by the Navy for years, but is now a series of tourist shops, restaurant, exhibition areas and rides, and is all quite new.  It is Pride weekend here, so there were rainbow flags all around, they lent a festive atmosphere to the Pier.  The other major decorative elements that were to be found all over were large models of lips with tongues hanging out.  They were advertising for an exhibit about the Rolling Stones.  Even though we didn't want to see the exhibit, we did like looking at the variously painted tongues.   We walked along the outside of the pier and looked at the tall ship Windy that was docked along side it, along with several other large party barges and tourist boats.  We got to the end of the pier and admired the Chicago Harbor Light, the light house that stands out beyond it.     We certainly were enjoying the weather.  It was sunny and breezy, and just about perfect.  We're pretty sure that we were seeing Gary, Indiana, across the southern corner of Lake Michigan.

     When the ticket booth opened by the large ferris wheel, we tried to buy some passes for the Go Chicago Card.  We had a brochure that led us to believe that the combo ticket that we wanted would be available there.  Unfortunately, the one we wanted-- which would allow us to go to any number of attractions over the course of three days-- wasn't able to be purchased on site there.  We had to do some online purchases on the spot using Julie's phone.  After downloading an app, we were able to use the phone for admission to places.  That made Scott, a smart-phone Luddite, a but resentful, but at least it worked.

     We had listed places that we might want to see and decided that the 3-Day Go Chicago card would probably be best for us.  It seems like a lot of money down at once, but it actually saves you money from admissions, and actually allows and encourages you to do even more things just because you have it.  We weren't going to ride the big ferris wheel, but since we had the "card" now (at least virtually), we decided to give it a try.  It was a nice ride, with a narration about how the wheel had been constructed for Navy Pier's centennial in 2016.  We had a private car with lots of room which gave us a chance to view the area around us and see more of the skyscrapers along the skyline.

     Before we left Navy Pier, Julie wanted to get lunch at Jimmy Buffet's Margaritaville.  It doesn't sound particularly "Chicago-y", but she'd had a huge plate of nachos there with the teachers when she was here a few years ago, and she had been looking forward to going back for it.  We figured that the plate would be big enough for a lunch for all of us.  When it finally came, Julie said it was much smaller than the one she had here before.  Still, we all seemed to have enough for lunch.   We then took the "Water Taxi," to get to the Field Museum.  Once again, she had enjoyed taking the Water Taxi with the teachers, and had wanted to go to the Field Museum before but didn't have time.  Taking the Water Taxi cost us $40, one way, because it wasn't covered on our Go Chicago card, though.

     The Field Museum is part of Chicago's "Museum Campus," which includes the Shedd Aquarium and a planetarium.  The Field Museum itself is a natural history museum, comparable in many ways to the Smithsonian's Museum of Natural History in Washington DC.  The Field Museum was not free like the Smithsonian, but it was on the Go Chicago card.  However, it seems like at least a third of the interior of the museum is taken up by various "specially ticketed" exhibitions, which require an extra fee.  Our cards only covered one of them.  We could choose between the "Underground Adventure" or the "Hall of China."  The girls choose the "Underground Adventure" because, as Emma said, we've already seen China.

     The first thing that we saw upon entering the Field Museum was "Sue," the biggest and most complete T-Rex fossil ever found.  She is an icon of the museum and quite famous,  Her real head was too heavy to mount safely, so it is displayed on a balcony up above the main hall, and we saw it too, later.    We went to the Underground Adventure, where you are "shrunk down" to 1/100th of your normal size.  The exhibit explains that "Soil is so much more than dirt... It is a living system," and as such it is teaming with life.  A handful of soil holds more organisms than the whole human population of the Earth, and we got to visit with many of these creatures which were now 100 times bigger than they normally would be.  After these models and animatronics, we went to the "Inside Ancient Egypt" exhibit and saw quite a few real mummies.  Of course, we've seen mummies before at the British Museum and other places, but this time Emma was interested in seeing them too, and we spent a while looking at them.  There was even an "unwrapped mummy," the body of a young boy.  We then went to the top floor and went to the "Evolving Planet" exhibit, which took us through the history of the Earth and its several mass extinctions.  The highlight of this area is certainly the dinosaurs.  Generally speaking, the fossils are all "real,"   One sign explained that, "Of the nearly 1,300 specimens in 'Evolving Planet,' more than 90% of them are real."

     It was around this time that we found ourselves on Natural History overload.  It's not that the museum was poorly done-- far from it.  But we had seen similar exhibits relatively recently at the Smithsonian and the Fernbank Museum of Natural History outside of Atlanta.  Julie started looking for the small theaters to sit in to give her leg a rest and we all kinda zoned out with her as we watched the video loops of the stories of the mass extinctions.  We went rather faster through the "Ancient Americas" and the rather extensive exhibit on the cultures of the Native Americans of the Northwest Coast and the Arctic.  We skipped the "What is an Animal?" exhibit altogether, even though it takes up most of the floor on the main level of the museum.  We had enjoyed this museum, but we were all ready for something else now.  We didn't want to pay $40 again for a "Water Taxi" back to Navy Pier, so we took a regular old "Land Taxi" back and it cost us a small fraction of that amount.

     We then used the Go Chicago Card on Julie's phone to take an Architecture River Tour from the Shoreline Sightseeing Company.  This tour was top-notch, and our guide, named Jim, was both knowledgeable and entertaining.  The cruise went up the three branches of the Chicago River, and gave a lot of insight to the many beautiful skyscrapers that line its banks.  The river itself is symbolized by a Y shape in a circle which is found in many places in Chicago, and our trip went through the heart of this Y-shape.  We entered the river near Navy Pier and Jim explained how the river's flow was actually reversed by engineers in the 1800s through a system of canals that take the water out of Lake Michigan instead of emptying into it.  This is the water that is turned artificially green on Saint Patrick's Day, but which is already a natural green from an algae from Lake Michigan.  We passed under many "Chicago style" drawbridges that allow traffic to pass over the river.  

     Jim was good at pointing out and explaining the several architectural styles of the many buildings that we saw- from Art Deco to more modern styles.  The Trump International Hotel and Tower building seems to dominate one area, and it was the fourth largest building in the U.S. when it was built.  Jim explained how it is representative of the Contextual Style of architecture and explained how its curved mirrored surface is meant to both blend with and compliment its surroundings.  (Kudos to Jim for keeping the architecture to the forefront and never hinting that anything else might be important about the name "Trump" on the side of the building.)  He pointed out how beautifully the sky and the white puffy clouds were reflected in some of the other mirrored buildings in a way that almost made you feel like you were looking right through the building itself.   We saw the "Corn Cob" buildings of the Marine Towers, built in 1962, and could clearly see how the lower levels were parking garages for the many residents that lived in the apartments.  We saw the relic of the Old Chicago Main Post Office, which served as the bank building that the Joker and his henchmen attacked during the opening scenes of "The Dark Knight."  And near the end of the trip, we saw the enormous height of the Willis Tower.  Jim explained that even though it's spelled "W-i-l-l-i-s," to a true Chicagoan it is pronounced, "Sears,"    Way up at the top, you could see the small glass-floored balconies that allow brave souls to stand above the city and look straight down.  The people are so high up that you couldn't really see them with the naked eye, but if you zoom in on the pictures, they are certainly there.  By the end of his tour, Jim had done a superb job of supporting his claim that architecture and the culture of the time reflect each other.  The tour only lasted a little more than an hour, but there was a lot of good stuff packed into it.  There are other companies that offer architecture tours on the river, but Jim made this one great, and we highly recommend it.  

     The broad boat that we rode for the architecture tour gave us a chance to sit and enjoy the breeze as we listened to Jim's narration, and we all needed a rest and a refresher.  We had laughed when Emma got dressed this morning and she wore a t-shirt that said, "It looks like I'm listening, but I really don't care."  She said it was for the tours we would take today.  When the tour was over, we tipped Jim, and went to Navy Pier to find dinner.  We ended up getting a pepperoni pizza-- not a Chicago-style deep dish pizza, but just a regular New York-ish one.  It hit the spot though.

      We were going to try Lake Tour but our Go Chicago cards are only good for one boat ride per day.  We tried to find our way to Lower Wacker Drive, but our GPS gave us problems whenever we were under the "El" train tracks.  We ended up being directed away from the river, and a Chicago police car blocked our way.  We thought sure we could see a movie camera mounted on a small platform, and we guessed that someone was filming something on that stretch by the river.  We wondered if it might be a movie, or maybe an episode of Chicago P.D. or Chicago Fire.  Julie likes watching those shows, and more recently Anna has been watching them too.  We ended up making our way back to our hotel in Lombard, with a stop at the nearby Target to pick up some things we noticed we were missing or wished we had.  We got back to the hotel about 8:00, but that feels like 9:00 to us, so that's pretty late, really.  We then checked into our new room, which we will have until Thursday.  It's got two double beds, but because it doesn't have a couch and a table, it feels like we've got a little more room now.