Archive for August, 2013

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Chicago — Part 1

We’ve been talking about it for years but someplace else always came first. Usually someplace European. Last year the arrival of our daughter Arya caused our travel plans to be come a lot more domestic in nature so we finally planned our trip to Chicago.

We rented an apartment through AirBNB that was in the Northcenter area but within walking distance of a Brown Line metro stop to the Loop. The apartment is great: spacious and very child friendly. Lots of toys and books for Arya to use. And the neighborhood is quiet but has lots of good restaurants near by.

Our first night we had a late dinner at a place called Mrs. Murphy & Sons Irish Bistro which had a great beer selection (Two Brothers for me) and excellent food. Arya was still on Seattle time, but since it’s two hours later in Chicago, it’s actually working out pretty well for us. She doesn’t mind being out until 10 and gets up at a reasonable 7 o’clock.

We started our first full day by taking the el to the Willis (Sears) Tower to take in the spectacular view. Let me just pause a moment here to sing the praises of the City Pass. I debated the necessity of getting them, but since we were planning on seeing at least three of the attractions anyway and could easily be talked into seeing the others it was a no brainer. And it proved it’s worth the first day by allowing us to skip the hour to hour and half wait in line to get to the observation deck.

The view was pretty great and Arya had a fine time running from window to window and even stepped out onto the skybox with no problems.

Arya on The Ledge

That was the high point (pun absolutely intended) of the day. The low point came a few hours later when we were on the Sea Dog Architecture River Boat Tour in an open boat. That’s when the sky opened up and we were drenched through to the bone. Arya was a little trooper and hardly complained at all. Even if we hadn’t got soaked I don’t think the tour would have been as great as we were led to believe. This is probably because we didn’t go on the Architecture Foundation tour, which wanted to charge us $30 for Arya. Sea Dog only charged us a dollar for her.

After our drenching we decided to cut the day short and head home to dry off which was just fine because I’d had about all of the Navy Pier experience I needed (think Fisherman’s Wharf in San Francisco only bigger).

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Posted in Illinois, Journal Entry, Travel | 7 Comments