August 6, 2006: Chicago

Today we drove from Michigan through Indiana to Illinois, skirting the southern shores of Lake Michigan. We entered the Central time zone and set our clocks back an hour. As we approached Chicago, road construction was everywhere, so I was glad it was a weekend; I could only imagine how bad the traffic would be at rush hour on a weekday.

We debated how to spend the afternoon. Debbie’s newlywed cousin Keri and her husband Jonathan, who live in Chicago and whom we had hoped to see, happened to be in New York for a few days, so we would unfortunately not be visiting them.

The weather was cloudy and rainy as the Sears Tower came into view. We figured the view from the Skydeck on the 103rd floor wouldn’t be all that exceptional, so we crossed it off our list of things to do today. At 110 floors and 1,729 feet to the tip of its antennas, it’s been the tallest skyscraper in the world since its completion in 1974.

We passed US Cellular Field, home to the White Sox, where a big banner proudly proclaimed their 2005 World Series win. From the Loop, we got onto Lakeshore Drive and passed Soldier Field, where the Bears play football, just as the sun came out.

Part of its design, resembling a Greek temple,

complements the neighboring Field Museum, well-known for its dinosaur fossils. King Tut’s treasures are on tour there, and we contemplated purchasing tickets, but they were costly considering that only a couple of hours remained before the exhibit closed.

The Field Museum is part of Museum Park, a waterfront area with an aquarium, a planetarium, and a great view of downtown.



We continued north, past the raucous final afternoon of the 2006 Lollapalooza Festival, and settled on Navy Pier as our activity of the day. While searching for a parking space in the vicinity, I had a sudden flashback to my family’s 1968 trip:

My father got lost in Chicago and stopped to ask a policeman how to get where we were going. The cop must have been puzzled, for in the back seat, my sister, brother, and I had assumed a bizarre posture. Our feet were pressed to the ceiling of the car and our thumbs to the floor. My mom was reaching back from the front seat to help my brother Jim hold his legs up.

We were playing a game in which crossing a railroad track required us to say “zit,” lick our thumbs, and touch them to the ceiling. My sister Peggy Sue added a rule: if we passed under railroad tracks, we had to reverse the first rule. But we were stopped under El tracks and couldn’t unbend without losing the game. The cop, who must have seen much stranger things, didn’t say a word about us. He just gave Dad directions and we drove on.

Navy Pier, which juts out into Lake Michigan from the center of the Chicago waterfront, is a collection of shops, eateries, entertainments and, as we finally discovered, plentiful but pricey parking. Among other attractions, the Pier includes concert and exhibition halls, a shopping mall, a food court, an amusement park, a beer garden, a children's museum, an IMAX theater, the Chicago Shakespeare Theater, and the Crystal Garden, an arboretum with fountains under a spacious cruciform greenhouse.

We hit the food court first, where we had deep-dish pizza for lunch. I couldn’t help speculating that Chicago-style pizza might be one of reasons the “City of the Big Shoulders” (as Carl Sandburg called it) has so many Big Bottoms. (Sandburg wrote his Whitmanesque poem “Chicago” in 1916, the same year that Navy Pier was built.)

This weekend the Pier was hosting tall ships, several of which sold sightseeing cruises. We played landlubbers, though, staying on shore and taking it all in: the plastic pirates,

the fluttering flags,

and the stylish schooners.

There was, in addition, a small but informative exhibit of stained glass by Louis Comfort Tiffany, an artist Debbie and I have taken a special interest in since a large exhibition of his wide-ranging work came to the Seattle Art Museum last year. The Navy Pier exhibit is part of the free Smith Museum of Stained Glass Windows.

But most Chicagoans come to the Pier for fun, not education. They watch passing boats,

listen to blues bands,

and applaud performers like “Box Man,” an acrobat and contortionist.

The man fitted his body through tennis rackets and squeezed it into a 2 x 2 x 2-foot box.

We patronized the overpriced and underwhelming “Funhouse Maze,” which the boys insisted on exploring twice.

We also played miniature golf and rode the carousel and the Ferris wheel,

which presented us with a wonderful view of the skyline at dusk (the John Hancock Tower is the tallest building in this picture).

It was a fitting way to end the day, since Chicago is the birthplace of the Ferris wheel. The first one was built in 1892 for the Columbian Exposition, greatest of all the 19th century world’s fairs. The original wheel, erected to rival the Eiffel Tower and capture the world's imagination, was the brainchild of a bridge-builder named George Ferris; it stood 250 feet high and held 36 60-passenger cars. Navy Pier’s is only 150 feet high and each car holds only four people, but our boys thought it was great nonetheless.

I decided the Windy City was a splendid place to be on a sunny summer Sunday.

We left Chicago on Interstate 90, the road that, with a few detours, will take us all the way back to Seattle. First stop: the town of Rockford, Illinois, about 80 miles northwest of Chicago, where we stayed the night at the Baymont Inn.