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.