Saturday, June 19, 2010

Chicago - day one - Wednesday

We packed and drove to Iowa City to catch the bus to Chicago. Chris dropped us off at the downtown IC mall - and went off to find a parking spot for the van in the Hancher parking lot 1.5 miles away. This gave Sam and Kate time to eat lunch (Taco Bell) and I ordered gyros and fries for Chris and I at a nice little restaurant - the best gyro I've had in a long time - probably since we ate with Drew and Chris at a favorite St. Louis Greek restaurant - the name escapes me, of course.

Bundled up the kids and luggage and went to the bus stop - typically travel by bus has a negative connotation - for the $2 per person round trip fare I was not expecting much - but I was pleasantly surprised. We rode comfortably on the upper deck of the Megabus all the way to downtown Chicago - wifi was in and out but I was able to browse and surf enough to make the trip pass by quickly.  We were dropped off at Union Station after four hours, on time - we gathered our bags and barely turned around before a very nice gentleman had our bags in the trunk of a cab and we were taking off for the Hyatt Regency - downtown. Later I found out the nice gentleman was a cab hustler and it cost us $3 for him to secure the cab - worth it in my book, but not Chris' I think. Cab fare was $11 - not too horrible.

We checked in and found a fabulous room on the 20th floor overlooking Navy Pier, the river and lakefront - very pretty view - which is always nice - much better than say a parking lot or busy street.

We were hungry - and after perusing the magazines decided on Chicago style pizza and headed out to find Giordano's - which appeared to be close to our hotel - we set off and walked the two blocks to Michigan Avenue only to realize we had gone to far and the restaurant was actually kitty korner from our hotel - very convenient :) Our pizza was bigger than our tummies, but yummy. The consensus was Tomaso's in Cedar Rapids is still better. We decided it would be wise to walk off some of the calories from the ten pounds of cheese we consumed and headed to Millenium Park - after a bit of a walk - we found a playground - which is the only one we saw our entire time there - and the kids played and we watched. More walking - back to the hotel - baths and bed!

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