Day 143- September 6 Chicago, IL

   DAY 143

September 6

Good Morning Chicago!!


Paul started with his early morning walk and took this photo.

I went museum hopping in the normal morning hours while 
Paul chose to stay on the boat and work on routing for the next phase of movement in the Illinois Waterways.

First stop, the Shedd Aquarium.

Those who know me know that I love scuba diving, the ocean, all the creatures of the ocean, etc. Going to an aquarium is enjoyable and bittersweet for me. Having seen most of the creatures in their natural habit I love looking at them, but they are never as good as seeing them in their real habitat and watching them interacting with the reefs. The aquarium has a large portion of it dedicated to the lakes and rivers which is good to teach the locals about the fish and importance of not polluting. The displays are very well done. I also commend the Shedd Aquarium for their efforts at promoting everything from coral regeneration to recycling by selling water in aluminum cans. I must admit though, that my love is of the ocean and it's creatures. I do encourage you to see the Shedd Aquarium if you get the chance. I limited my picture taking to just a few so I wouldn't bore you. Here are a few photos of some of my favorites.

Pot Bellied Seahorses

The Jellyfish are amazing.

The White Seahorse is usually found in Australian waters.

I'm always tickled when I catch two in the same photo.

The lab grows corals!!

These are all lab grown corals, amazing to see.

A Weedy Seadragon

Time to move on...

Right next door is The Field Museum which has more than you can see in one day and I only had 2 hours. Wonderful displays and commentary on so many things.

The Egyptian display was fascinating, ok, maybe a bit morbid?

The bird display had every bird you could imagine. I was impressed by this one.

The real reason I wanted to visit The Field Museum was to see the t-rex Sue. Sue is the most complete t-rex ever discovered. It was discovered about 120 miles from where I live in South Dakota. It has a very colorful history involving lawsuits, FBI raids, and big money. I was cleaning a fax machine in the building that was raided by the FBI one week before it happened. Click here if you want to learn more about that.

This is the ACTUAL head. It weighs over 600 pounds and is too heavy to mount. 
A lighter weight copy of it was made for the full display.

Stopped in the Gem section for a quick look- Wow!

Wouldn't this look lovely with my blue jeans???

As you can imagine, this was a tiny sampling of what I saw. Another must do stop if you are in Chicago looking for interesting places.

Back to the boat to pick up Paul and go on an Architectural River Tour.

I justify this as a route recon for our own trip down in a couple of days...

Antonio, the tour guide with Shoreline Tours, was very good at entertaining us with all the details of the buildings of downtown Chicago. His commentary was entirely too vast for us to describe each building and the architect that that designed it. So, please enjoy seeing what we saw.


The wavy building was designed by a woman!


We thought this one was on the Jetson's TV show.

A fountain tucked in for the water lovers.

Officially the Marina City Tower, but fondly called the corncob building.
Many of these buildings were in movies, including this one.

Click here to learn about the stunt that made this building famous, Steve McQueen drives out of and flies into the river. 

The video shows where the 3 waterways of downtown converge.

The reflections were amazing.

Bazaar Meat?? How bizarre is it?

The one on the left is the Willits Tower (Sears Tower). More on it tomorrow.

The only way they could meet set back requirements was to taper the tower until 30 feet above the sidewalk. So they did!

This one chose a different method to allow for the 30 feet sidewalks

required by code.

This one was inspired by sailboats. 
Click here to see inside photos. Lots of triangle rooms.

This place is cool.  Literally.  It was originally a cold storage place back in the 30's.  Sold and being refurbished, it took months to thaw out the horsehair insulation.  Now you can lay out a cool mil for a condo.

The walls were 4 feet thick!!

We went by minutes before they started spraying the water.

When in Rome...

After doing the River Architecture Tour, we went in search of the iconic 'Chicago Style Deep Dish Pizza'.  Thus a schelp of about a mile took us into the heart of the concrete and steel canyons of downtown, where we found Giordano's Pizza.  With several outlets in the city and a line inside it seemed like the place to be.  We scored a couple of seats at the bar (these Chicago people haven't broken the code for fast seating).

Lacking any form of local advice, we ordered a 10" (serves "2-3 ppl") "Classic" deep dish pie with peppers, onions, mushrooms and pepperoni with a couple of Modelos to wash it down.

Eventually, the pizza arrived, but not before another brace of Modelos.  Truth be told, I wasn't all that impressed but I was hungry.  It came sliced into six pieces.  I should have ordered it sliced into four pieces for two apiece because I can never eat three slices.  Thus, we had a to-go box with two slices of Giordano's Classic Deep Dish Pizza for the one mile trek back to the boat.

Somewhere along the way, we overtook a young couple going our direction.  I instantly noticed that the young lady was carrying a foil tray with a clear plastic lid.  Upon closer inspection, it looked like nachos.

When we came abeam, I said in a loud enough voice, "Oooh!  She's got nachos!"  When she looked over, I said "Wanna trade?"

To our surprise, she  asked, "What have you got?", eyeing the Giordano's box.  "It's Classic, pepperoni, mushrooms, onions and peppers, two slices" , offered Cheryl.  "Deep dish?" she asked. "Yup!", we replied.

We could hear her saying something along the lines of "I think I'd like that, but you can't be serious."

Cheryl spoke right up and said, "He's serious, we'll trade you!"

That's how we managed to have left over nachos with our lunch the next day.

Now if that isn't a random experience on the streets of a big city, what is?

The nachos were delicious, after toasting them back to crispy.

More of Chicago tomorrow!

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