Road Trip 2010! Days 18 / Chicago

Chicago is an amazing city. Now that that’s out of the way,  I can explain why. Sarah and I had an awesome day walking around the city, experiencing the architecture and sampling some of the local food (i.e. deep-dish pizza). We drove into the city from our hotel near O’Hare and arrived at the parking garage on Washington Street at about 8:30. Compared to the previous evening, when we were driving through Friday evening rush hour, the city was practically deserted. At first we really had no idea where we were going, so we just started walking north toward the Chicago River. Once we got over the river, all of the bridges went up and we started to hear the sound of helicopter rotors. Pretty soon we realized that a helicopter was flying very low along the river and filming with a large camera mounted on the nose. We ran down some stairs to a point along the river and watched as the helicopter did pass after pass. After a while we moved on and began to walk toward Navy Pier.

Once we arrived at Navy Pier, we were immediately drawn to the Ferris Wheel. The sun was just starting to break through the clouds, and a ride on the wheel started to seem particularly inviting as a means to better see the city. We bought tickets, and enjoyed the 7 minute ride and accompanying audio tour that told us some basic information about the architecture of the city and some of the buildings that we could see. Once we finished with out ride we walked back over the river and made our way into Grant Park, where we found a park bench and sat down to eat lunch while looking up at some of the enormous apartment buildings of Lakeshore East.

From there we walked over a shiny, steel-plated bridge into Millennium Park. The park was just another example of the incredible architecture in Chicago. The center consists of the Jay Pritzker Pavilion, which has a huge stage for outdoor performances and is topped by a shiny metallic sculture that reminded me of billowing storm clouds. It also features the “Mirror Gate,” which everyone simply refers to as The Bean. It basically resembles single bean-shaped piece of highly reflective steel, which distorts the reflection of the Chicago skyline and all of the people that can walk around it. Also, on the inside the surface goes up into the sculpture and creates strange and interesting reflections. Our next stop was the Chicago Architectural Society, where we looked at a 3D scale model of the Chicago skyline which, needless to say, was one of my favorite parts of the day.

At that point we were both getting a little tired of walking around, so we agreed to walk up to the movie theater on the north side of the river and watch Inception. After a nice rest and a thorough mind-blowing, we went straight over to Gino’s East Side and ordered a deep dish pizza for dinner. The pizza took 45 minutes to cook, but in the end was definitely worth the wait (and probably even the $18 we paid for a small). From there we made our final play of the day: going up to the John Hancock Center Observatory. In order to reach the 94^th floor of the building we were treated to the fastest elevator in the world, which whisked us up to the top in 45 seconds at a speed of about 25 mph. At the top the views were amazing and there were several displays that talked about the evolution of the city from a swampy trading post to a budding trade center to a burnt-out wreck and, finally, into the skyscraper-filled city that it is today.

From the Hancock Center we walked back down Michigan Avenue to the car just as it was getting dark, drove around Grant Park for a while to get a few of the city at night, and the drove back to the hotel to decompress from 12 hours in the city and rest up for the drive to Minneapolis. Chicago was a great experience – I’ll definitely be coming back.