A few weeks back, Heather and I took a (long)weekend trip out to Chicago.
The first noteworthy thing is that we tried out the Megabus from Des Moines to Chicago. I realize now that we didn’t take a single picture of the bus, or on the bus… I guess it didn’t seem that noteworthy at the time, but looking back it probably was. So imagine a double-decked charter bus at about 30% capacity. We left early afternoon Thursday and got into Chicago just after dark.
The bus dropped us off at Union Station, more or less right where we wanted to be. After a little walking (a nice break after about six hours on the bus) we checked into our hotel.
Oh, before I go on I should note, a few great deals Heather hunted down. Thanks to early booking, the bus tickets were a grand total of $8 round trip for the two of us! The Hotel was booked using Hotwire, and while not quite shocking deal the bus tickets were, surprisingly cheap considering it was a great room, and the view wasn’t half bad:
The next morning we walked around down town for a few minutes, had breakfast in a deli/coffee shop kind of thing, and then found our way into a Chicago information center of some sort. The center was staffed by very patent people happy to explain the public transit system to those of us who don’t exactly have a handle on the turbulent mix of letters, colors, and numbers that guide the natives around the city.
A hand full of pamphlets, two conversations with the desk person and one page of notes later, we were ready to take on the rest of our trip! First stop the Museum of Science and Industry. Getting to the museum required walking about a mile, then catching a bus with the correct number on it. We got on the bus without issue, but started to worry if we were really going to know our stop as the maps we had lost considerable fidelity once you left the downtown area.
We got off ‘near’ the museum, but in hindsight we probably could have stuck with the bus for another mile. On the other hand it was a really nice day, and we were walking through a beautiful old neighborhood so I don’t think we lost much in the deal.
Once inside the museum, we wandered into the first exhibit that caught our eye, featuring the first steam engine to break 100mph, and a giant model train set of the city and approximate countryside :
The model came complete with day/night cycles… had we realized that sooner we probably would have taken our pictures during the ‘day’… oh well.
After the train area, we headed over to a weather exhibit, that had incredible potential, but was awash in grade school field trips. I still got to see some amazing things, including what I think is the first Tesla coil I have seen in person!
As it was after noon, and we were standing next to the cafeteria, a lunch break was the natural next choice. The exit from there dumped us into a large farming exhibit (sponsored by John Deer, as you could kind of guess simply by the amount of shiny green paint on display). You would think we could skip that one, given my background and Heather’s current job, but it turned out to be really interesting to see how things were being presented, and how other museum goers were responding.
We could have spent more time there, but we had an appointment to see a boat:
Let me just say that presenting the sub in a room that really felt like it could be a real sub pen was awesome! actually, everything about that exhibit was well done. It was sad that we rushed through the intro area, because our appointment was for the tour of the inside of the sub. After seeing the inside, we worked our way back through all the displays that were leading up to the sub. I suppose it helps that both Heather and I have a substantial interest in that era of history, but the U505 exhibit could have entertained us for another hour or two without any trouble.
Could have, but we wanted to catch a movie on the omnimax screen they had. It’s like imax, but a dome instead of a flat screen. The only problem was we realized about 2 minutes into the movie that we were watching an imax movie on the omnimax screen. It was still really neat to see, but perhaps not quite as unique as it could have been.
At this point we had been to roughly a quarter of the museum, and were just trying to figure out what to see next, when they paged that the museum was closing. So instead we started trying to decipher the bus map again. The good news is we were 2 of about 300 people planning to ride the bus back to downtown, so we didn’t really have to do much searching.
From downtown we caught another bus and headed over to the area marked “Little Italy.” As predicted, it didn’t really look any different from other parts of Chicago, with the possible exception that every restaurant was Italian. The good news is we just headed that way to try some Italian food. I don’t think I could properly explain the food, except to say it was good, and it wasn’t the sort of thing you would find at a chain type place, so I think we accomplished our mission.
For the second day, our main attraction was the ‘Chinatown’ area of Chicago. Getting there required that we use the subway system, another first for us. (we used the elevated train network extensively during our last visit, but the two networks are separate). Again the stop we got off on wasn’t real close, but we had a rough idea where our desired destination was, and eventually found this:
It was very authentic I guess, not real touristy in that it was mostly grocery stores and hair salons, neither of which had an abundance of english signage. Eventually we talked to a shopkeeper who gave us vague directions to “Old Chinatown” that was apparently just down the street, and was the place with the gift shops. After a few minutes of walking we did in fact find it:
That street was made up of nothing but more grocery stores alternating with gift shops all selling exactly the same stuff. It was fun to look through for a while, but we quickly felt like we had seen everything. We looked around for a place to get lunch, but the wait time at the only pace that didn’t have chickens hanging in the window (Heather’s only stipulation for making the selection) was over an hour, prompting us to just head back to the train station.
We then had a very American lunch of hot dogs, and spent a few hours gawking at large buildings before catching our bus back to Des Moines.
-Jordan
Nelsons 