Wednesday, June 29, 2022- To Chicago

      For Christmas 2019, Julie's parents gave Scott a picture frame map of the states.  The idea is that you put a picture in each state to show where you have been.  Scott had fun putting the pictures in and said that you could basically see the plan for our future trips by looking at the left over spaces.  Well, Julie has been staring at some of those space for the last two years, and has been getting antsy to try to fill in some of the gaps with pictures of us and Abby.  That's the genesis of this year's summer trip to Iowa, Nebraska and Colorado.

     Our flight was scheduled at 5:45 AM, which meant that we had to leave the house by 3:30 to get to the Buffalo airport in time.  It was a short, short night for all of us, and Emma says she didn't even sleep then.  (She, and all of us, have been napping as much as possible through a lot of the rest of the day to make up for it.)  Oddly, another flight on the same airline was leaving to Chicago O'Hare just a few minutes before ours, but we were scheduled to stop first in Baltimore before finally getting a plane to O'Hare.  When we finally got to O'Hare, we were not impressed by it.  It is sprawling, but somehow cramped as well.  It is almost devoid of decoration.  Julie said it was "dooky."  But other than that our flights were unremarkable.

     We finally found our baggage and the car rental, only to learn that we weren't going to get the minivan that we thought we were.  (They needed a credit card for something that big, apparently, but because of some fraud that showed up in our account, we cancelled that card just yesterday.)  We ended up getting a Ford Edge, which we're used to anyway since we used to have one.  The good news is that it will ultimately be cheaper to rent per day and should use less gas-- and this summer in particular, that can amount to some significant savings.

     We made our way to Schaumburg, where our hotel is (as well as where the mall is we were headed to later.)  It was about 12:00 noon when we arrived  Julie was insisting that we get some pizza for lunch, but Abby didn't want her to leave so Scott drove to the Pizza Hut for them.  We then got everyone to settle down for an hour or two for a much needed nap.

     We got up again around 3:00 PM, and slowly roused ourselves to head to the Woodfield Mall to go to the big attraction for Abby-- Peppa Pig's World of Play.  You might remember that we just went to the Peppa Pig Theme Park in Florida back at Easter time.  At the time, Julie said that we needed to go then partly because Abby might move on to some other show before some other time that we would be able to go.  When she said that, it seemed almost unthinkable that any show could replace Peppa on our TV, but Julie was right.  While Abby still likes Peppa, she is much more apt to ask for "Blaze and the Monster Machines" or even "Blue's Clues" now.  Still, when we learned that this Peppa Pig World of Play was here, we knew we wanted to give it a try.  We are glad that we did.  Emma went to walk around the mall while Mom and Dad went with Abby into Peppa's world.  You start by going on and through  Miss Rabbit's bus, and when she let's you out the back, you are in Peppa's land.  After a quick photo op, Abby was off and running and she didn't stop for more than an hour and a half.  

      Many of the characters were represented in "life-sized" statues, like they were in Florida, and they are standing in settings familiar to viewers.  Peppa is the first to greet you at the door, standing there with her Teddy.  Danny Dog is at his grandfather's petrol station and tow truck, and Zoe Zebra is neaby at her father's yellow mail truck.  Grandpa and Grandma Pig stand in their prized garden with their four chickens (Sarah, Vanessa , Jemima and Neville), along with Grandpa's miniature locomotive, Gertrude, and one of the garden gnomes that he hates so much.  One of Abby's first adventures in Peppa's ended up as a minor disaster.  Rebecca Rabbit's house is filled with holes and soft tunnels to climb through.  Abby loved these, and made her way up one climbing tunnel to the second floor.  It was a tight space, too tight for us to follow her, and from there she didn't like the looks of the slide that she was supposed to come down.  We tried coaxing her to either come down the slide or go back the way that she came, but she just called for help.  Since Emma wasn't with us, we had to look for help.  We asked one mother if her two boys might help us, and they tried, but the mother ended up going up in to the rabbit house too.  Ultimately she came down the slide with one of the boys.  She kept playing hard, but she was a little slower to go into certain play areas because of this.  She didn't want much to do with the girls' treehouse or the boys' fort, for example.

     Abby loved certain spots, though, and her favorite was the Pig family house.  The family's big red car is parked outside where kids can play in it, and the house itself is set up like it is on TV, even more so than the one in Florida.  As with the theme park, the more familiar that you are with the episodes, the more details there are to notice.  Scott noticed the Daddy Pig's football jersey in the wash, and only the second time through did he look up to see that Daddy Pig's pancakes were stuck to the ceiling.  Abby saw George's dinosaur in the refrigerator and made Daddy Pig a "sandwich." with some pieces on the table.  Every few minutes Grandpa Pig called on the telephone to ask if we had seen his parrot, Polly.  Abby kept telling him that Polly was there, in the living room.  Abby liked sitting in Daddy Pig's chair in the living room, where Mr. Potato was on TV.  There's little question that she liked Peppa's house the best of all.

     There were some repeats from the Florida theme park here.  The movie cinema, for example, was filled with bean bag chairs where you can lounge and watch Peppa Pig cartoons.  It didn't seem to be as popular as the one in Florida, but that's because it wasn't an airconditioned refuge from the heat and sun outside.  There were some new places too.  One corner, for example, had many of Miss Rabbit's places of employment, but since she was off driving the bus, you have to cover her jobs for her.  There was the market and her taxi and the bus with Madame Gazelle, who leads the singing while the landscape whizzes by.  Instead of a diner, there were snacks being sold out of the camper van.

     There were some things that were broken.  At the muddy puddles, it was supposed to be that the Pig family gets splashed as you jump up as you jump up and down, but they seemed digitally frozen.  Goldie the fish was clearly supposed to be on top of the TV, but she was gone.  Still, most things did work, and Abby was continually finding a new button to push or a new lever to pull.  No one seemed to be putting things away, though, and objects that were supposed to be for one activity were found all over the place.  Parcels that were to be sorted on the mail truck, for example, or tambourines for the music with Madame Gazelle, were everywhere.  The worst of these problems were the bikes, which were supposed to be ridden around a track by Grandad Dog's petrol station, but which ended up zooming all over the town.  We were guilty of that too, but it seemed like there should have been more staff helping put things back in place (and probably sanitize them too, all things considered).  And two more small quibbles- There were several "apple trees" but Tiddles the Tortoise was not in any of them, and Pedro Pony was nowhere to be seen.  😉

    That's probably more than we had to write on Peppa Pig, and we apologize if we went on too long about it, but Scott says that he's like Daddy Pig and he's a "bit of an expert on these things."   It is safe to say that Abby had a great time here, and Mom and Dad did too.  We did get her to reluctantly say goodbye to her friends here and left after more than an hour and a half of activity.  

     Peppa Pig closed at 6:00, and we had made arrangements for dinner with Scott's cousins.  Dean and Carol live nearby here in Schaumburg, so we contacted them and asked to meet them in the food court of the mall.  We thought it would be easier having Abby in a mall because she still gets restless and can be a handful at a fancier restaurant.  This setting worked well for us, and we were able to talk to Dean and Carol for a while.  Julie has a fun time talking to Carol whenever we get together and talked to her about everything from politics to "Restorative Justice" in schools (they both are against it).  Most of the time, Dean talked separately to Scott and they caught up on how their families are doing.  Dean mentioned his recent trip to Hawaii, where he visited our cousins Cathy and Bob.  The mall closed at 8:00, though and although we have napped throughout the day, we were getting tired by 7:30. The gained hour from crossing to Central Time just added to our exhaustion.  Abby started insisting that we leave.  We had hoped to do a little shopping in the mall too, but that might have to wait until tomorrow.  We went back to the hotel and settled in for some much needed sleep.