I have a niece who is attending grad school just outside of Chicago. She has been there since last summer and since her time there is coming to an end in a few weeks, she invited Morgan and I to come visit her and to see where she has been going to school. Dawn offered to drive us up and we met Amslie at her dorm and she was able to spend some time giving us a quick room and campus tour.
A little later, we drove over to pick up Grif (Amslie's boyfriend) and then we parked at the train station and took the train down to Union Station before spending the day walking around Chicago and seeing the sights.
As soon as we came up out of Union Station, there were just cars (loudly honking) and sky scrapers and people walking everywhere!! I was looking up and pointing and taking pictures. Obviously didn't mean to embarrass myself and the others, but a couple of locals started laughing because we were definitely the tourists!! LOL
Our plan was to grab lunch at Giordano's Pizza, which is just a short walk from the train station, so we headed that direction. I haven't been to downtown Chicago in years and I guess that I never realized that DePaul and the University of Chicago were both right there.
While we were eating our lunch, a woman came by holding a camera and she asked us if we wanted to have our picture taken. All of us just looked at each other and hesitated to respond because we were pretty sure that the pictures weren't going to be free. The lady didn't seem to notice however and then she started posing us -- one picture as a group, and then another picture with me sitting beside Morgan and another picture with Dawn next to Amslie, and so on. She took several pictures and then she left. We just went back to eating our lunch but a few minutes later she came back to our table with our photos printed out and put into a cardboard frame. She told us that they were $20 a piece or we could get two prints for $15 each. We passed them around for a short time "admiring" her work and then we just awkwardly put them back into a pile in the center of the table. She acted like she didn't know what to do, but she took the framed photos with her and then came back to leave a black and white postcard in case we wanted to change our minds.
I wanted Amslie or Dawn to have the actual photo for a souvenir so I took a screenshot.
It took a little while longer to eat lunch than we had thought so we didn't have much time to walk to the aquarium where we had tickets for a 1:00 - 1:30 entrance time. Wow! We walked as fast as we could all the way there and arrived at 1:34. Thankfully they still let us in!!
Here are a few sights along the way -- I never stopped walking -- I just took the pictures as we were walking quickly by! LOL
Chicago Hot Dogs -- It was closed. Along with quite a few other shops along the street.
The Buckingham fountain at Grant Park.
We would come back to that later in the day and take pictures as a group.
And then after walking for about 45 minutes, we finally arrived at the aquarium.
We didn't watch any live shows, but the Beluga whales had just finished doing a show when we arrived.
Penguins are always a cute favorite to watch.
And we enjoyed standing in front of the large dolphin tank as they just kept swimming by us. Then they would leap out of the water and make another quick lap around.
Can you find the Anaconda?
I am not sure what kind of fish this was, but it was huge!
Grif... pretending to be a fish!
Taking selfies in front of the large dolphin exhibit
A tree boa.
I'm not sure why he hung upside down like that, but it just looked freaky.
After we finished the aquarium (about 90 minutes later), we walked outside and around the backside along the lake and just started walking down Lakeshore Drive. It was such a beautiful day as far as weather and a lot of people were taking advantage of by riding bikes and running or even sailing.
The planetarium was the other direction but we didn't go there this time.
We walked about 1.8 miles from the aquarium all the way to Navy Pier and then walked more as we went all the way to the end. 'Maybe some day I will go back and ride the ferris wheel or stay in one of the hotels at the end because I'm sure that the view is pretty amazing from the top.
When we got to the end of the pier, we found a bench and just sat and rested for a while. We also took some time to take some pictures and just decide what we wanted to do next.
Girls' picture...
Girls' picture... plus Grif!
After resting our feet for a bit, and getting something to drink, we headed back towards Lakeshore Drive. We needed to catch the 6:30 train back and we still wanted to see the fountain and the Bean.
'Better get walking again...
I'm not quite sure what was going on in Chicago this past Saturday night, but instead of walking through a few parking garages and heading into the South side of the park, security redirected us all around to the west side of Millennium park and we had to go through heavy security.
I have never seen or visited the Bean before so we had fun just looking at it from different directions and taking a few pictures together.
With our time quickly dwindling down, we left the park and started walking back towards Union Station, just cutting back a couple of blocks to stop by Buckingham Fountain one more time to see it up close and to finish out our picture taking. It really was a pretty area and I wish that we had more time to wander through all of mazes and flower gardens.
Our train was suppose to leave at 6:30 and we had about 20 minutes to get there. A few blocks away from Union Station, we saw that they were blocking the road and police were everywhere. We overheard someone asking what was going on and the only response was "A Parade". We still have no idea who the parade was for or why the increased security and unfortunately, we didn't have time to wait around and find out. We ducked down into the subway entrance, went under the blocked road, and came back up on the other side.
Finally... just another block or so to go and we would make our train.
Wow! What a day!
We walked just under 11 miles on the day and somewhere over 29,000 steps, but despite how tired we all were, we had a fantastic time together and are already talking about our next girl's day.
