Today was our second day in Chicago...we woke up a bit later than we had planned, but we made the most of it. After breakfast, we purchased tickets to the Chicago Trolley tour, where you take a double-decker trolley to 16 different stops around the city and you can get on and off wherever you want. We chose a few stops to visit and for the rest of the tour, we listened to the guide speak about each area we drove through. It's a great way to get a feel for a city in a short amount of time. Our first stop was Millenium Park. It has some great sculptures (including the silver bean, which has a more official name, but the silver bean makes more sense), a beautiful flower garden and some funny face fountains, among other things.
We got back on the trolley and drove through the next few areas. Our next stop was the Adler Planetarium. We decided to purchase the Chicago GoPass, which gets you access to four different museums and either the Hancock Building or the Willis Tower, which both have viewing decks, and it's good for nine days. With our GoPass, we got admission to the planetarium, as well as tickets for two shows...so, we chose the Night Sky Live, which is a more traditional planetarium dome show that detailed what tonight's actual night sky would look like in Chicago, as well as the Cosmic Collisions show, narrated by Robert Redford. Both were really interesting and just leave you feeling like space is even more incomprehensible than you originally thought :) There are also two floors of museum exhibits. One of the nice things about this stop was that it was right on Lake Michigan and the view is gorgeous...there must be food coloring in that water, it is such a perfect shade of blue.
We had originally planned to go to the Field Museum afterward (right down the block), which is Chicago's natural history museum, but it was already around 2:30 by the time we left the planetarium and we had to be on our final trolley back to our original stop by 5:00, so we decided to save that for tomorrow and get back on the bus. Our last stop was Navy Pier. We were told it is the most visited tourist attraction in the mid-west. It's comprised of a long narrow building with different stores, restaurants and places like the Amazing Chicago Crazy Maze...or something like that...and convention space. Then down the one side is a a street for pedestrians only, with restaurants and food vendors. Finally, there's the mini carnival area with the famous ferris wheel. It gets quite windy and cold out on that pier, so we started off with some beers in plastic cups...yup, another place you can walk around with an open container. We had some tricky-trick Chicago-style hot dogs for lunch...claimed to be Chicago, but were just regular old hot dogs in poppy seed buns...not cool...but still delicious.
From there, we got back on the trolley and took it all the way to our original starting place by the Willis Tower (if you're not sure what that is, it's the Sears Tower...a company named Willis purchased space inside the building a few years back, along with the rights to change the name...we just aren't sure why they would.) We walked back to our hotel to get ready for dinner. We decided on a place called Miller's Pub, a few blocks away. It got great reviews and had a pretty extensive menu and turned out to be pretty good. We actually met a guy from New Jersey traveling for work while we were there...thanks again John, for the coupon...safe trip home :)
After dinner, we walked over to the Skydeck at the Willis Tower...it's open until 10:00 PM and we had heard lines are crazy during the day, so it seemed like the perfect time to get a bird's eye view of Chicago. The first stop is a couple floors down to a bunch of exhibits featuring different areas of the city. Then there's a video about the history of the building...and finally the 60-second elevator up to the 103rd floor. The audio tour was included with our GoPass, so we were able to learn a lot about the different sights from each side of the building. There are also more exhibits up there, as well as four sky walk areas, with clear glass on all four sides...very freaky. We wound up staying almost until closing time and then we headed back down the 103 floors and "home" to our LQ. More tomorrow!
Today was our second day in Chicago...we woke up a bit later than we had planned, but we made the most of it. After breakfast, we purchased tickets to the Chicago Trolley tour, where you take a double-decker trolley to 16 different stops around the city and you can get on and off wherever you want. We chose a few stops to visit and for the rest of the tour, we listened to the guide speak about each area we drove through. It's a great way to get a feel for a city in a short amount of time. Our first stop was Millenium Park. It has some great sculptures (including the silver bean, which has a more official name, but the silver bean makes more sense), a beautiful flower garden and some funny face fountains, among other things. 
We got back on the trolley and drove through the next few areas. Our next stop was the Adler Planetarium. We decided to purchase the Chicago GoPass, which gets you access to four different museums and either the Hancock Building or the Willis Tower, which both have viewing decks, and it's good for nine days. With our GoPass, we got admission to the planetarium, as well as tickets for two shows...so, we chose the Night Sky Live, which is a more traditional planetarium dome show that detailed what tonight's actual night sky would look like in Chicago, as well as the Cosmic Collisions show, narrated by Robert Redford. Both were really interesting and just leave you feeling like space is even more incomprehensible than you originally thought :) There are also two floors of museum exhibits. One of the nice things about this stop was that it was right on Lake Michigan and the view is gorgeous...there must be food coloring in that water, it is such a perfect shade of blue.
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