Chicago- Wednesday, June 28, 2017

     Once again, we slowed our start in order to get past rush hour.  However, we decided to leave Chicago a day early so we packed up everything that had gotten scattered over the small room, and packed the car.  We then headed towards the Shedd Aquarium.  Columbus Avenue was closed down for preparations for the Taste of Chicago, even though that event doesn't even start until July 5th, more than a week away.   The traffic in the area was slowing down a little because of the diversions.

     Scott's cousin, Denise, took us around the Shedd Aquarium.  We picked her up at her and Mark's condo, which overlooks Soldier Field and is only a short walk from the aquarium.  We drove together there today, and parked a little closer, partly because it was threatening rain.  Once inside, it was like we were getting our own private tour, and she seemed to have a wealth of interesting things to say in front of each fish and animal.  She normally does behind the scenes tours and she has recognized on a sign in the aquarium as one of the long-time volunteers at the institution.  We always enjoy aquariums, but going through with her added a whole new dimension and was an enormously interesting.

     We started out by at the Stingray Touch.  Denise had told us to watch for George, a large dark-colored male ray who often hides beneath the waterfall but sometimes comes out and splashes unsuspecting people.  Julie did get to touch him, but didn't get splashed.  Next we went to the beluga whales.  Now, you have to understand that ever since we saw the whales trying to mate at the Georgia Aquarium last summer, the words "beluga whale" are enough to get Anna and Emma smirking and giggling.  Imagine our surprise when she told us that it was probably Beethoven, one of the whales that was from the aquarium here.  Because of the need to carefully breed the whales, the any of them might be shipped around the country.  When Anna asked the logical question, "How do they get the whales from one aquarium to another?" Denise answered "FedEx."  She then described how the whales are carefully moved and flown in a FedEx plane with their keepers.  We didn't see Beethoven today, but we did see a young male named Grayson.   We saw Pacific white-sided dolphins that had a different face from the bottle-nosed dolphins we're used to seeing.  They loved swimming very fast and were up-side down as much as they were right-side up.   The grumpy looking rockhopper penguins were nesting, and she told us how the aquarium staff sneaks the eggs away from them, view them to see if they are actually fertilized and growing, care for them, and then sneak they eggs back in to the penguins just before they hatch.  Many people are using the penguin encounters for wedding proposals now.  The sea otters are smart enough to unscrew the covers of the filters, so there were large rocks put on them to keep them down.

     The next major section of the aquarium that we went through was called "Amazon Rising," which is designed to show the difference between the times of low water in the river compared to the highly flooded times.  There were almost as many land animals there as there were fish.  Denise described how much she liked to sit in front of the coral reef tank and the shark tank to enjoy the peacefulness of them swimming around when there aren't many visitors around.   She showed us a trio of shark eggs that were held up to illuminate them from behind.   We could clearly see little worm-like shark embryos wiggling around in them.  In front of many of the tanks, Denise would say, "Oh! I love this one because..." but once she actually said, "The Mandarin dragonet is my favorite," and she noted how the fluorescent blue lines look like someone painted them on it.  [It's the fish pictured at the start of this blog entry.]  She also told us about how an archer fish once shot her in the face with a squirt of water when she was talking to a group of visitors.  Julie's favorite animal of the day was the octopus who was very active and crawling around on the front of the glass.  Other octopi that we have seen have usually just been curled up in a corner.

    We were having such great time in the aquarium, but even though there was quite a bit left to see, we also had to be getting to lunch.  It was after 1:00 when we dropped Denise back off at her condo and parted ways.  We then drove to a Corner Bakery (which turns out to be a chain that is very similar to Panera's).  We had finally gotten in touch with Scott's other cousin, Dean, who lives quite a ways north of the city, but is now working in a office downtown, just a few blocks from where we met him.  We had seen Mark and Denise at Scott's Mom and Dad's 50th wedding anniversary last year, but it has been even longer since we've seen Dean.  We thought it was funny when Dean mentioned brought up the idea that "We all start to morph into our parents."  Last night, Julie had noted that Mark looks and acts a lot like his father, but Dean has become even more of the spitting image of him.   We were sorry that we weren't able to see Carol, but we were certainly glad that Dean was able to make time for us at short notice and for such a late lunch.

     Anna has been looking for shirts or hoodies from the TV show "Chicago Fire," Julie is also a fan of "Chicago P.D."  Anna wanted to go back to Navy Pier for a hoodie she had seen there, but we learned that it was actually merchandise for the local soccer franchise, also called "Chicago Fire."  Anna really wanted something from the TV show instead, or even from the actually fire department.  When Scott learned that the programs are on NBC, he pointed out that there is an NBC building here in Chicago, and we had passed it several times, including on the bus tour.  It was where Oprah filmed her shows when she was in Chicago.  Scott figured that since the NBC building at Rockefeller Plaza in New York has a great store with lots of merchandise from their programs, that there must be a store here at the Chicago building too.  The internet seemed to confirm this idea, and we made our way through the traffic to the building.  Scott and Anna went in but were told by the security person in the lobby that there had been a store but it closed a few years back.

     Even though it was approaching 5:00 and we would now be facing rush hour traffic to get out of the city, we were ready to say our goodbyes to the Windy City.  It was a great couple of days, but we're ready to move on and start the next leg of our trip a day early.  We made our way across the Wisconsin border and added a new state to all four of our life-lists.  (Actually, from here on in, every state from here to Washington will be new for all four of us.)  We then stopped for the night at a motel in Pleasant Prairie, the first town across the border along the Lake Michigan shore.  There was a tornado warning tonight, though nothing came of it in our immediate area, we don't think.  However, we did get the first significant rainfall tonight on what has otherwise been a week of cool but beautiful weather.  We took it easy this evening, had some Pizza Hut, and turned in rather early.

Chicago- Tuesday, June 27, 2017

     We're seeing the advantages of sleeping in, and got up slowly again today, so by the time we were done with breakfast, rush hour was over.  Our first stop was the Adler Planetarium.  It is one of the museums in the "Museum Campus," along with the Field Museum that we visited on Sunday and the Shedd Aquarium which we're going to visit tomorrow.  It's really an amazing collection of buildings in an ideal spot.

     We got to the planetarium shortly after 10:00 and used our virtual Go Chicago cards for admission.   Of the space related exhibits there, we were most interested by a large exhibition on the life of astronaut Jim Lovell, an adopted son of the Chicago area.  The museum used the point of view of his life story to tell the history of the early manned space missions, because he was never far from where the action was, and in some cases, he was right in the middle of it.  The exhibit featured the capsule that he and Buzz Aldrin rode in for the Gemini 12 mission, which was the last before the Apollo missions began, and included extra-vehicular space walks.   There was a statue of him blocking the view of the earth with his thumb, as he did on the Apollo 8 mission around the moon, and of course, some artifacts from the problem-ridden Apollo 13 mission.

     We ate a lunch from the cafe at the planetarium partly because we had some time to kill before the shows we had picked.  Our tickets allowed us to pick two of the presentations and the girls chose "Destination Solar System" and "Welcome to the Universe."  The first presentation was in the large domed theater that you'd associate with a planetarium.  It was a "family friendly" presentation, so there were lots of kids there from a YMCA camp.  The premise was that it was 2096, and we were on a spaceship to visit the Moon, the Sun, Mars, the asteroid belt, and Jupiter.  The second presentation, "Welcome to the Universe" was a lot like the old film "The Power of Ten." it started at the Earth and slowly back away until we saw the "Cosmic Web"-  the patterns in the clusters of galaxies at the limits of the observable universe.   The big difference in this presentation is that it is up to date in both its information and its technology.  The images around our Earth and solar system came from real data from satellites and space exploration.  A live narrator at the rear of the theater explained the images as we retreated backwards.  (BTW- Scott had thought about taking some time on this trip to re-create the opening scene from the 1977 movie, Powers of Ten, since it was a childhood favorite of his and it begins at a "picnic near the lakeside in Chicago," near Soldier Field and the Museum Campus itself.  Scott owns a copy of the Time-Life book called Time which is scene in first 1 meter by 1 meter field of view as the camera begins to back away.  However, he forgot to bring it when we packed, and since we didn't have any of the other picnic items anyway, he sadly decided not to try it.  Still, today's movie was a great substitute for it, even if the girls that picked it ended up thinking it was boring.)

     We took a cab to the Art Institute of Chicago.  The family had originally snubbed the idea of going to an art museum when we were deciding what we wanted to see.  Yesterday on the bus, though, the girls heard that certain pieces that they actually knew were there, and since it was also on our Go Chicago card, we went there.  Tempers were flaring a little bit, so when we got there, Julie suggested that the girls have some autonomy in the safe space of the museum.  The museum is big and sprawling and even a bit confusing, but it is a very secure space, and the two teenagers were ready to go off on their own for a while.  We picked out a place to meet and said we would rendezvous  there again in an hour.  Emma disappeared on her own almost immediately.  Anna stayed with us to find "American Gothic" by Grant Wood, which shows the farmer and his daughter in front of their farmhouse.  We also saw Edward Hopper's "Nighthawk," showing a study in loneliness in a diner's window.  Anna then went her own way.  Julie and Scott went through the ancient Greek and Roman collections and then looked for through the medieval and Renaissance works.  We ended up among the Impressionists, and saw the famous pointilist picture, "A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte" by Georges Seurat.

     Afterwards, we all picked a favorite work that we saw at the Art Institute.  Emma picked, Monet's "Rocks at Port- Goulphar."  Anna's was"American Gothic."  Julie liked the bright colors and realism of the Medieval and Renaissance collections like what she saw in "Jupiter Rebuked by Venus" by Abraham Janssens, but ended up picking Renoir's "Seascape" as a favorite.  Scott liked the 17th Century Dutch painting, "The Family Concert" by Jan Steen, as well as a Sebald Beham's German woodcut known as "The Large Village Fair," and was drawn into the details of each, wishing he could step into those scenes.

     After the art museum, we paused at a Starbucks and then walked down Michigan Avenue, alongside the buildings that face Grant Park.  We did a little window shopping at a few souvenir stores.  We stopped for a while to admire the incredibly detailed model of the city that is laid out at the Chicago Architecture Foundation.  Scott was impressed by the amazing instruments in the windows of a music shop in the same building, but since you had to ring a doorbell to even be admitted into the shop, he figured everything was out of our price range.   He crossed the street to take pictures at the monument to the Civil War General John "Blackjack" Logan.  But our ultimate goal was to get to dinner with Scott's cousins.

     After a couple of tries, we had been able to arrange to meet up with Scott's cousins, Mark and Denise.   We said that we wanted to go someplace "Chicagoey," and they were going to suggest that we meet at  Giordano's for Chicago pizza, but Denise has been reading the blog and found out that we already went there last night.  She suggested a place called Burger Bar Chicago, which certainly did the trick.  Not only did we have time to chat there for a while, but it was very close to where we all needed to go.  They live close by, walking distance away, at a place that overlooks Soldiers' Field.  Meanwhile, we were now in sight of the Museum Campus again.  Before parting, we made arrangements to be able to meet Denise again tomorrow.  She is a volunteer at the Shedd Aquarium, and we're sure it will be fun to see it with her.  Since we know they read the blog, we want to thank them for treating us to dinner tonight.  It was great spending time with you both.

     To get back to the car, Anna wanted to try one of the blue bicycles that are available to rent.  We figured out how to do it and she went off ahead.  We were following behind her, but she got so far ahead that she brought the car back and picked us up.

     By the way, today was the last day that our 3-Day Go Chicago card was good.  By our quick estimates, it looks like we saved about $400 total by using the cards, and we certainly did a lot of things that we wouldn't have done if we'd had to pay for them individually, so all-in-all, we're really satisfied with it and would recommend it again.  It was a lot more flexible than the City Pass card and covered more sites too.