September 4
We woke up to another brilliant day in Chicago. The plan: Millennium Park, a boat tour, then get on the road again by mid-afternoon.
In Millennium Park, where I pulled out my good DSLR camera for the first time on this trip, I realized that I’d left my camera charger plugged into an outlet in our hotel room. We had already checked out but had left our luggage in storage at the hotel (along with the car) so we were going back anyway. It was a good reminder early in the trip to keep our wits about us and not leave our belongings scattered in hotel rooms across the United States. I called the hotel housekeeping service and they promised to find it.
Millenium Park…one of the nice things about Chicago that I never enjoyed while there on business. Loved everything about it. The Frank Gehry walkway (above), which reminded us of Grace making Frank Gehry a PB&J sandwich when she was babysitting for the architect down the street, who asked her to watch the kids while the architect’s mentor visited their house. Grace had no idea who he was. We were the only adults without children at the vast kids’ playground:
And, of course, the Bean.
I’m skipping all the selfies I took here, because if I look plump in real life, you should see what I look like in the Bean. Grace took this one, and it’s not too bad because it expanded her hips and shrank mine:
We were quite taken by the fountain that has giant video images of faces:
…because every once in a while, they spit:
Yes, we are easily amused.
On Nick’s good suggestion, we ducked into the (free) Architecture Foundation model of the city, which was really helpful and interesting:
Then we scurried to our appointed time for the Architecture Foundation boat tour. The Marina Towers are still among my favorites because they are so Jetsons:
The new skyscraper below would be attractive but for a few small details:
I took many more photos on the boat trip because it was fabulous at the time, but they don’t translate well to the written (digital) page. We topped off the boat trip with a nice brunch, and all in all I was feeling quite smug about the decision to sojourn for a full 24 hours in Chicago.
Then we returned to the hotel. The luggage, the bike, the found camera charger and the car all arrived at once. One glance at the car and anyone could see something was drastically wrong. The green bookshelf, once neatly tied to the center of the roof, was now all the way at the back of the car with its top sheared off. It seemed that the valet who drove it out of the garage was not as mindful of the height as the one who drove it in. Because the bookshelf had been so tightly ratcheted in, it took off pieces of the car’s luggage rack as it was shoved to the back. Just as we were discovering this mishap, we opened the back of the car and found that the cooler filled with dumplings and kimchi (which Grace had filled with more ice in Pittsburgh a good 30 hours earlier and forgotten about) had leaked Asian food-infused ice water all over her TV, her computer and her cardboard box of important papers. Grace was not sure which disaster to be more hysterical about. I insisted that we abandon the bookshelf, pointing out that we would make up the $45 cost of the bookshelf in gas mileage over the next 2,000 miles by not having a huge block of wood (OK, mostly particle board) on the roof of the car. In addition to being cheap and now ruined (and arguably unattractive even before that), the front of the bookshelf was matted with dead bugs from our first day on the road. I considered this an easy call, but some heated debate ensued. The valet had left the car triple-parked on Wacker Drive, so this was by necessity a very quick debate, in which I prevailed. I matter-of-factly informed the valet that it was now his job to dispose of the bookshelf, a small price to pay for having smashed it up. We hightailed it out of Chicago and pulled into the first rest station to inspect the more problematic water damage. The laptop was wet but still functioning. The TV was just damp. We dried out various important papers like Grace’s prescription for her heart condition, and went on our merry way.
In hindsight, and also in real time, this incident was the low point of our trip.
The travel plan called for us to have dinner in Madison, Wisconsin. We were grumpy trying to figure out where the center of Madison was, but we cheered up a little bit to discover a street fair on the blocks surrounding the lovely capitol building, which seemed to have six different facades — I need to research this building because it was interesting.
After drinking some beer and eating some unhealthy food while sitting on a curb, we got back in the car and drove another few hours to Rochester, Minnesota, where we stayed for the night.