Road Trip to Chicago

I just got back from a wonderful road-trip to big city of Chicago. In the past going to a big city never really appealed to me. This time I thought why not go, it was a chance for my wife to visit with her family members living there.

We started out on a Thursday morning from northern Minnesota and arrived late afternoon right around rush hour. The great part was that we were going the opposite direction heading into the city. It was amazing how many toll booths we needed to go through to get there. I do have to say that having a DVD player in the minivan is a great way to keep the kids quiet and happy. We arrived at my wife's aunt and uncles house and stayed there through Monday.

On Friday we started out early to go to the Brookfield Zoo. Well not really as soon as first hoped, it's not easy getting everyone going at the same time in the morning. We had a great time at the zoo and really enjoyed seeing the monkeys in this huge building that seemed to keep going on and on. We bought tickets to the dolphin show and this was really fun for our kids to see. One of the dolphins had the same name as my daughter and she was thrilled. It was getting close again to rush hour, so we rushed around the zoo as quick as possible. Just one of those things that we don't think about where I live. I felt like we must have seen almost everything. Then I looked at the map and noticed there was a large outside loop around the zoo that we didn't even get to. I would suggest going two days to this zoo, it's big.

http://www.brookfieldzoo.org/

Our downtown Chicago day was Saturday. Learning how to follow someone in this traffic was interesting. Especially because I'm driving a minivan and trying to follow her uncle in a very quick BMW. I guess I did alright, we never lost each other on the way there or back. We started out at Millennium Park and it was really neat to see. There were a bunch of huge sculptures in the park. One kind of looked like a huge bean shape and it was polished like a mirror. You could take pictures of this and you would see yourself and the city buildings behind you, lots of fun.

http://www.millenniumpark.org/

We had lunch at a place that was featured on Saturday Night Live. If anyone remembers cheeseburger cheeseburger with John Belushi, Dan Aykroyd, and Bill Murry. This place was really old and plain looking but it was the history that made this fun to go to.

We did some shopping for our daughter at the American Girl store. We also went to the Hershey's store, Disney store, and a few others.

http://www.americangirlplace.com/agp_chi_splash.php
http://www.hersheys.com/discover/chicago.asp

We had a special invitation to go to "The MIX" radio station. My kids really liked getting to see a DJ live on the air (nice to have family members that work at such a cool place). There were great views out of the Prudential building overlooking the city and the water.

http://www.wtmx.com/

We ended up quite far away from our parked cars. We really didn't want to walk that whole way back. We decided to take a crazy taxi ride back. I was amazed how fast we were going but we all survived the ride.

We drove to Wrigley field on the way back, again the history to this place, it was great to see.

The rest of the time was spent in the outside areas of the city visiting with family and having some great Chicago style deep dish pizza, yummy!

The overall trip experience was great and I would love to go back to Chicago again sometime.

Do you want to experience Chicago on your own? Just go to our homepage at http://travelhunters.com/ and click on 'Vacations' at the top of the page. Select 'going to: other', later a long list of destinations will show up, click Chicago.