Saturday, May 13, 2006

Chicago: the good, the bad, and the ugly

Originally, I thought I would have pages worth to write about Chicago; now I'm feeling lazy, so I'm going to sum it up quickly for you. We had a great time, but - but - the weather wreaked a bit of havoc with us. Our first afternoon in the windy city was warm and overcast, but from then on, it poured. And poured. And then it rained a little bit more. Our one full day was also windy as all get out, which made for a pretty miserable experience, especially for Liam; we must have spent half the day going from store to store trying to find one of those weather shields for his stroller, and nobody - not Sears, not Walgreens, not Bloomingdales or Neiman Marcus - had one to sell to us. We made do with garbage bags. Poor little guy.

We still had a blast at the zoo (which we wisely visited that first, rain-free day), and the aquarium. We still stuffed ourselves with deep-dish pizza and Garrett's popcorn (wow!) and Chicago-style hot dogs. We still shopped up and down the Magnificent Mile (not a bad way to spend a rainy day) and got to visit Paper Source in person, affirming its status as My Favourite Store Ever. We rode the El and Liam did well on his first airplane.

This was probably the worst weather we've had on any of our trips. The good news was that pouring rain in the city is a lot easier to deal with than pouring rain on a mountainside would be. The bad news is that pouring rain with a baby is not as easy to deal with as pouring rain for just the two of us. In addition to the rotten weather, we also had a small run of bad luck: a wheel fell off the stroller (luckily there were 8 wheels on this model rather than 4, but sorry Megan, I won't be returning it to you in one piece!) The clasp on the diaper bag broke. Our flight home was delayed an hour. Little things that, while we enjoyed ourselves, make it good to be home again, too. We definitely hope to go back sometime; Chad is already trying to have his conference moved from May to September, so he can be wined and dined at a Bears game rather than the Cubs...

PS - yes, that's Liam checking himself out in the BHG Baby issue at Borders! Page 151.

2 comments:

megan said...

Glad you had a good time. Not to worry about the stroller, I am sure that I won't be needing it again. For those of you, like me who couldn't see who was who in those pic's just click on them and then in the slightly larger version click in the lower right hand corner. They will enlagre so that the over 30's can see that they are all of Chad (and Liam).

PS WHen I was in Chicago with Carolyn a few years ago we both had to buy umbrellas on the first day and then we had beautiful weather. Try that next time :)

Carrie said...

Sorry for blinding you with the photos. I printed them this small for the scrapbook because I didn't get many good ones. Bad weather = fewer photo ops and much less desire to even get the camera out of the bag.