america's 2nd city

This morning we got woken up by a loud rat-tat tat on the door, last night we slept in a car park we were not really allowed in. Well we played lost tourist it works normally but this time it didn’t they made us pay another $32 after a lot of fuss and bother… That was the first time we didn’t wake up to our song.

After finding another park in town (luckily it was Sunday so only $30 for the day for an oversized vehicle in the middle of town - one place wanted $120 for the day!) we headed to the bus stop. There were a couple of companies offering double decker bus tours so after Dad did his usual haggling, we hopped aboard. In fact we managed to get us 3 kids on for free, saving more than the extra $32 the grumpy guy charged us at the 1st carpark. Swings & roundabouts eh.

Tim, our tour guide, was so cool. He as really funny and new quite a bit about rugby, (Dad liked that) & they also talked about baseball and other sports. At the start we had the tour guide to ourselves, until some more people hopped on. It was really interesting, did you know Barack Obama met his wife here and they supposedly fell in love! We also saw where he made his acceptance speech after winning the presidency.

Chicago is a really neat city - heaps of different architecture because a fair chunk of the town (except the water tower) was rebuilt after a huge fire in 1871. The city is massive - 2.8 million regular imhabitants but another 5 million commute in every weekday. You get the impression that they have a real complex about New York being bigger and better - locals often seem to refer to themselves as America's 2nd city. The lake & waterfront are really beautiful although the marinas were all empty... the lake freezes in the winter so all the boats are put into storage to avoid damage from the ice.

The bus tour is hop-on hop-off and busses come every 20 mins or so. So after going right around once, we alighted at Navy Pier which is 1 mile long and was used as aircraft carrier landing practise during WWII. The weather was freezing so we were glad to get into some warmth. Inside were there were heaps of shops & eateries but the best bit was a show run by the Disney Radio folk - me Amy and Emma watched it for over an hour and we won heaps of loot. It was cool! The olds walked right to the end of the pier and back. We then bussed to Portillos for a Chicago style hotdog which had mustard, chili, gherkin, tomato, onion, and like heaps more. Apparantly you can get kicked out of Chicago for putting ketchup on a hotdog! Then the olds had a beer @ Hard Rock Cafe & we had fries & a sundae at the biggest McD's in the world - it is 2 stories tall!

Then we went to the Sears Tower, recently renamed Willis Tower where the viewing deck is 103 floors high. They had 4 special viewing boxes that you could stand in and look down. You were standing on glass @ 103 floors above the ground!!!. This is the tallest building in the western hemisphere and held the world record for the world's highest building between 1967 and 1999. Apparantly they are building one in Dubai which is twice as tall!!!

The bus had stoped running by then so we took a taxi back to the carpark and decided to head out of town and find somewhere to sleep. Sometimes easy things become quite a mission - we got lost because the motorway was closed and the GPS got really confused. On a detour we went past a giant oil refinery, it was massive!!! We ended up staying the night at a Wal-Mart in a little place called Hammond, IL.

tomorrow we're headed to Indianapolis...

til next time, love from Deanna