Following up from, Day One
On our second day, we understood the train schedule much better, so we caught breakfast and had plenty of time to catch our train. One of the things we discovered the night before while chatting with people in line to get our table at the pizza place, was that the St. Patrick’s day festivities were going to be on Saturday (day two for us). This mean that there were extra trains running! It also ended up meaning downtown was busier than normal, but we managed. The extra train was an express train, meaning after our stop, it went all the way to Union Station without stopping! That saved us about 30 minutes getting into the city. The train was full of people decked out in green and planning their bar crawls… the mood was “festive” to say the least.
Once in the city, we flowed with the sea of green over towards the park where the parade was slated to begin in about an hour. Neither Heather, nor I had realized that it was going to be the St. Patrick’s day weekend, so we didn’t have any green to wear! We only felt a little out of place, as it was so cold and rainy, lots of people were bundled up in coats of all colors.
Our pre-learning about the parade plan had been to head to the aquarium first thing on Saturday. The parade was more or less on our way from Union Station to the aquarium, so we figured it was an ideal addition. The parade started about 20 minutes after we got to the park. In talking about it, most of what Heather and I knew about the parade was from watching the movie “The Fugitive.” As the movie lead us to believe, the parade was opened by a large band in kilts.
After the first few entries went past, we started walking “upstream” of the parade, towards the aquarium. Our thinking was that we would get to see most of the parade, and hopefully bead the crowd to the aquarium. (The parade started at noon, so it isn’t like we had a real early start). I don’t know how long the parade actually took to finish, but we walked about a mile of it in progress, and then saw another almost mile of floats packed together waiting to start down the route. It was fun to see all the pageantry, but I am glad we didn’t stand in place for all of that, it was way too cold for the way we were dressed.
Past the end of the waiting floats, we only had about another half mile to get to the aquarium. As we started getting closer, we could see what looked distressingly like a line leading up to the front doors. When we got there, we found that people were lined up for 200+ yards waiting to get in! The line did not appear to be moving all that fast, and we had been standing outside for about as long as we could handle at that point. We had a plan ‘B’ that was to head to the planetarium just a little farther down the waterfront from the aquarium. That walk was unspeakably cold! The path over there was exposed, and there was some powerful wind coming off the lake. Once we got to the planetarium, they had signs announcing that their system for doing the “feature” shows was broken, but at that point it didn’t much matter as we just wanted to be inside, anywhere! We bought entrance passes and tickets to a more basic planetarium show, then headed to their cafeteria. I would go back to the planetarium just to eat at their cafeteria on a clear day! The location kind of sticks out into the water, and we in a big glassed in area facing back towards the city, looking over the lake. It was a nice view, even on a cold rainy gray day.
After our late lunch, we wondered around the museum area for an hour or so, then headed into the planetarium show. It was Heather’s first time in a planetarium, and I hadn’t been in one for a long long time. The show was not riveting, but the narrator was very much the astronomy geek he claimed to be, and we enjoyed having him explain the things we were seeing. The show centered around the things you would see in the night sky if the background light from the city didn’t drown out all the stars. Considering that late nights are not Heather’s forte, I think it was a nice was to kind of get in some stargazing together :).
After the show we thoroughly covered the rest of the museum. They had a lot of really neat displays, and it provided great opportunities to talk about astronomy, something I probably have a much greater interest in than Heather, but she seemed to be enjoying it, and learning a lot!
When it was time to leave, we decided there wasn’t much reason to try and eat dinner in the city, and that we would go out someplace back in Naperville. Surprisingly, the walk back to the train station seemed about four-times longer than it has been when we were floating along with the group decked out in green. By the time we made it to the train station we definitely were ready to sit down! We had managed to make the station in time to catch an express back, meaning we saved another 30 minutes or so on our train ride.
When we got back to the train station, we were right on the banks of the river, and had hoped that by 5-ish that evening, it would be green. It wasn’t! I had read on some event guide that they were dyeing the river, and there was a specific bridge that provided “the best viewing” I guess it must take a long time for the dye to propagate though the entire river.
Setting for 30 minutes on the train really put us in a relaxed, sleepy mood, so we didn’t even manage to go out anywhere for dinner, but instead got some Chinese delivered to the hotel room. We had the laptop along, so we watched a movie on that and crashed.
I am going to roll the minor details of Sunday into this post as well, because they don’t really warrant a full post.
Sunday morning was the time change, only we didn’t know that. I had really been looking forward to one last day of the rather amazing waffles they had in the breakfast room. When I headed down to breakfast, I was sure I had about 30 minutes to spare before they closed things up, as did the family with the two young kids riding the elevator down with me. We dumbfounded by the closed door, until eventually, a nice member of the staff explained about the time change. The staff was really nice and let us sneak in and grab some milk and cereal to take back to our rooms. It was a let down from the idea of waffles, but at least we got to take advantage of the free breakfast!
After breakfast, the drive home was mundane, but we were wonderfully refreshed by being away from the norm for a few days.
-Jordan
Nelsons 