Day 40...Chicago, IL/Cleveland, OH

Well, we are back in the eastern time zone...but not before we spent a little more time in Chicago at the Field Museum.  We overslept quite a bit today...I accidentally hit the "off" button instead of the "snooze"...oops.  So, we missed free breakfast...we walked over to Cosi and then packed up the car.  We decided with the price of parking at the garage, it would be cheaper to just drive over and pay to park at the museum...parking is quite the racket.  Anyway, the Field Museum is the natural history museum in Chicago and it's gigantic.  With our GoPass we also received admission to a special exhibit, The Underground.  We arrived around 11:00 and set off.  This museum seems to be known for Sue, their T-Rex, which is the largest, most complete and best preserved ever found.  She is hanging out right in the lobby to greet you.

Our first stop was The Ancient Americas exhibit.  This took us through 13,000 years of life in the western hemisphere.  The exhibit was huge...and we somehow stumbled into pretty much every other exhibit on the east side of the main floor.  From there, we went across to Inside Ancient Egypt...they even had a replica of a tomb with a bunch of mummies and pieces of walls from real tombs with heiroglyphics.  We checked out the Underground, which turned out to be an exhibit showing what it would be like to live in the soil, if you were shrunk down 100 times...lots of huge, creepy animatronic bugs...blahhh..and a really big penny.  We also saw tons of animal exhibits, one that covered the history of Earth, from its start 4.5 billion years ago, as well as one on dinosaurs...seriously, each section was ridiculously large.  Before we knew it, it was almost 4:00.  Amazing...and we still had to drive to Cleveland...it was time to say goodbye to Chicago.

We took some photos of Soldier Field, where the Chicago Bears play, as well as a few of U.S. Cellular Field, where the White Sox play.

We headed out, planning to get to Cleveland around 9:30...not happening.  About a half hour in, we realized Racquel, our Rav4, was getting a bit testy.  We had noticed a couple of days ago that the tires were looking a little worn down, so we decided to give Hertz a call and see what we could do.  We wound up at the airport location in South Bend, Indiana...they could give us another Rav4, no problem.  Whew.  Of course, we will miss Racquel...she was so good to us for almost 9,000 miles and it will be sad to finish our adventure without her.  Our new Rav4 is less fancy, but newer, and should hopefully get us home...oddly, she has New York plates...maybe it's a sign that it's time to head back.  We are taking name suggestions...come up with the best name for our new car and win a prize :)