Chicago Vacation: Part 1

We recently took a vacation to Chicago for a few days and had a great time. We left Wednesday morning, July 21, 2010, and arrived at our hotel around noon after a chaotic commute on the El.

We stayed at the Courtyard Marriott in Downtown River North.

I'm a dork and I always take pictures of the rooms we stay in when we go away. Tom thinks it's silly but I still continue to do it. Here's our room and the view from the window.

After dropping off our luggage we left to explore the area and found ourselves on Chicago's Magnificent Mile (aka Michigan Ave). Hello shopping! :)

Here we are at the intersection of Chicago and Michigan Avenues.

To get a really good view of the city, you can go up to the observation levels of either the John Hancock Tower or the Willis Tower (fka Sears Tower). While we were shopping on Michigan Ave we realized we were right by John Hancock tower, so we decided to seize the opportunity to get a good view of the city.

You can see Navy Pier in this photo. It's the skinny part completely surrounded by water with the white buildings.

You can see Willis/Sears Tower here, it's the tallest building in the Chicago sky line. The one with the two large antennas on it.

The shore line of Lake Michigan.

Wednesday evening we went to Navy Pier to eat dinner and see the attractions.

We ate dinner at the famous Billy Goat Tavern, from the old SNL skit. They serve "cheezborgers" and chips. I wasn't impressed, it was mediocre at best. But, we were tourists and now we can say that we've been.

We rode the ferris wheel after dark, which gave us an awesome view of the city lights.

These pictures are blurry, but nevertheless, I think they look cool.

The night was capped of with a fireworks display at Navy Pier courtesy of Pepsi. My camera isn't so great, so none of my pictures of the fireworks turned out.

Dog Days of Summer

Man it has been super hot this week! I'm not sure what the thermometer actually read, but I know the heat index was in the 100's. Gross! All I have to say is I am so thankful for A/C.

Three words describe this past summer weekend: fun, busy, & HOT! Our weekend fun technically started on Thursday with our friends Daniel and Lindsay's wedding rehearsal and dinner. We were so excited to celebrate this exciting time with them, and Tom was honored to be able to stand up with Daniel as a groomsman. Their wedding was on Friday night at the Old Trinity of Paseo. (Click the link to read about the history of this building, it was originally from Canada.) Everything was beautiful and charming, and Old Trinity is such a wonderful place to get married.

The happy couple.

Saturday our nephew Michael on my side wanted to come stay with his Aunt Sara and Uncle Tom, so we picked him up and we had all kinds of fun playing on the Wii, eating pizza, watching movies, coloring, going to the park, eating fro yo at Pink Swirl with Grammy and Granddad (my mom and dad), and playing with Ruby. Ruby and Michael are best buds now.

Playing in the park was H-O-T, Hot! After we got back from the park it didn't take Ruby long to figure out how to cool down.

After we got Michael all settled in and ready for bed Saturday night, Ruby hopped up to snuggle with him and they fell asleep together. It was so darn cute!

We all got up Sunday morning and went to church. Michael went to a Pre-K Sunday school class. Then we took him into big church with us because I was helping lead worship, so we thought he would think it was neat to see me sing. Tom said about 3 minutes into the worship service Michael said, "Can I go back into my class now?" Ha! Guess worship with Aunt Sara wasn't as fun as playing in the sandbox.