The windy city!

Adventure....BIG CITY style!  Taxis horns blaring on every corner, smells that can knock you over, lights, flashes, crowds, wind, panhandlers, smiles, EVERYTHING expensive......That's what I can say about downtown Chicago.

Just so happened that the weekend we explored (mostly on foot, holy smokes the walking we did!) the downtown area of Chicago...it also happened to be the weekend of the Chicago Marathon, President Obama was in town to visit some "private donors" (gotta stroke the donors) and Monday finished it all off with the Columbus Day parade....none of which we new was happening before we arrived.

Apart from navigating throngs of people we had a fabulous time...visiting such places as the House of Blues, the Navy Pier (where we were in the above photo) and the Field Museum to name a few.  Other highlights included eating original Chicago deep dish pizza at the Pizzeria Uno (YUM!) and exploring the darker parts of the city via a haunted bus tour of various locales full of local flair. 

Who knew Harpo Studios had been torn down? And that was also the same site used as a staging area for family members to identify the victims of a horrible boat accident in 1915 now called the Eastland disaster....also described as "tragedy that defies description".... 845 people died.  When Harpo Studios was still there it was said that you could sometimes here sloshy footsteps and sounds of children laughing and playing in the building.  To read more about this disaster click here.

All-in-all was quite an experience....but oh my was I glad to return back to quiet, calm, country living again.

Needless to say...the city of Chicago has LOADS of history and certainly is worth many visits.  We hardly touched the tip of the iceberg during our stay.  Maybe that means we will have to visit again?

Before this visit, I knew nothing of the Chicago river...but another really cool thing we got to do was take a boat taxi from one end of this river to the other through the city. Was a COOL way to explore the high-rises of the windy city...and I had to laugh when we came round the bend in the river and staring us in the face was Trump Tower.  Only high rise I saw that had "TRUMP" in HUGE letters at basically eye level compared to the names on other high rises.  Nice branding there Mr. Trump.

Well, here we go onto more adventuring...who knows where we will end up next!