Return to the Windy City

[In case you missed me, I was away, but I’m back – and back to work – now. At this point, blog time is running about four months behind. There are a couple more summer posts after this one, then in fall I went to a cider mill for the first time in years and attended a conference. After that, I left the country for two and a half weeks, which hopefully I’ll finish posting about by next summer. Stay tuned.]

Once again, we leave Ann Arbor for this post and head back to Chicago. On this trip at the end of August, I was headed west to see a friend from Cornell – a former fellow ChemE, senior design group member, and roommate – who was vacationing in Chicago. This time, I did not travel at the crack of dawn on a bus-less holiday morning, but in the middle of a Sunday when both the city and university buses were running. I did miss church, but if I’m remembering correctly, this was the first Sunday that I’d missed all year. I rode Amtrak again, and the train ride there went smoothly (besides the fifteen minutes we pulled over to restart the electrical system . . .). Don’t worry, the train ride back was more than an hour late to make up for it.

Instead of recapping this trip day by day, I’ll condense it to two posts, one with things I’ve done before (this post) and one with new experiences (the next post). The friend I was meeting up with hadn’t been to Chicago before, so we did some of the big Chicago things that I’d already done because I’m the kind of person who eats the same ten things every day. I’m not going to be bothered by seeing the same museum twice in a summer.

After I arrived in Chicago on Sunday afternoon, we made a quick trip to the zoo that was notable mainly for the heat. A lot of the animals were in hiding. Either that or they were abducted by aliens. We did see the polar bear, which was MIA last time I was at the zoo. Most of the primates were also in view, mainly because they had no energy to hide from people.

The primates are #OverIt

The first full day in Chicago, I paid a second visit to the Field Museum to spend some quality time with Sue and friends, plus rocks, minerals, and taxidermy. Once again, I enjoyed it, and wandered around for most of a day. Because my friend actually likes food, we left around lunchtime to eat something that wasn’t an eight-dollar museum sandwich, then returned. I skipped the room of fake plants this time, and took more time to look at the dinosaurs. It turns out that last time we missed the part of the exhibit where Sue is being rehomed. She’s not on display yet, but there’s a viewing window that lets you see her in her mostly-reassembled state.

Hi, Sue

Lastly, would this even be a post about Chicago without a picture of Cloud Gate? The answer is no. Here’s the bean:

The back side of the Bean