Chicago Day 4 - Part 2

While my mother rested after the morning show and before the evening show, I took the opportunity to meet Adrianne again at the train station and once more, we rode downtown. This time we walked from the train station over the River Walk and then up Michigan Avenue by the water tower and along the Magnificent Mile – ‘One of the Great Avenues of the World.’

On the way to the River Walk. The reddish building is the Encyclopedia Britannica headquarters:

Another view of the river with the Tribune Tower in the center:

How would you like to park in one of these parking spaces?
Kind of funny the way the two signs in the background lined up :)

Tribune Tower: (the most awesome building!)

Interesting bas-relief on the corner of a bridge:

A beautiful live-flower arrangement:


We walked into the entry courtyard of the Wrigley Building – which was strange because from the outside, it looked like you were going to go inside, but once you went through the doors, you were still actually outside.



View from within the courtyard looking West:

Trump Tower:

Then we got into the Magnificent Mile - where all of the expensive stores are: SAKS, Bloomingdales, Cartier. Wow!

It was amazing that this picture even happened because there was so much foot-traffic by here.
In fact, the man who offered to take our picture had actually walked into another picture that Adrianne was taking of me.


The Drake Hotel - Where guests of the Oprah Winfrey stay or used to stay (I think!)

Here is the old water tower and Pump House:




I'm not sure exactly which building these heads are on but they are very interesting and look pretty old!


More beautiful tulips:


I absolutely loved the Chicago Tribune tower:

Not sure what the purpose of these blue trees outside the Fourth Presbyterian Church was!


Inside the courtyard of the church:




This building is really cool and I wish I had gotten some pictures of 'special' stones used in the building from around the world, ie. stones from the Great Wall of China, The Alamo, the Roman Colosseum, Westminster Palace, and The Great Pyramid, among others.


The entry to the Chicago Tribune Tower:

We stepped into the lobby of the Chicago Tribune Tower and I got a few pics.


I love the contrast of the old-style buildings reflected in the ultra-modern Trump Tower:

Chicago Day 4 - Part 1

Day 4 – Opening day of the Independent Miniature Artisans show – in Schaumburg again, but this time we rode on a chartered big yellow school bus to get there! We were on the first bus of the day so everybody was very excited and the noise level was quite high.

It was interesting riding alongside the train that I had been riding on so often in the last 3 days!

Here we were:
Once we got to the show, we had to wait in a long line to get our tickets.

This show was larger than the 3 blind mice show and had even nicer items!




I took a little break from the show to look around the hotel:


This was when I began to realize just how famous my mother is in the miniatures world! She has a website ( www.wannainelpaso.com ) and she also does a lot of posting on different blogs (or groups or something – I'm not sure exactly where she posts) I forgot to mention that we had a hard time just getting to our taxi last night because a lady recognized her name and wanted to introduce her to her friends. Then, we came close to missing the first bus this morning for the same reason!
It hadn't occurred to me earlier to take pictures of these people but it hit me at this show - I should be recording this!
Here are some people who “knew” my mother:



After awhile we decided to go back to our hotel to rest up for the big show that night. The bus was late so I went around and took a couple of pictures (surprise, surprise!)



Here are some more people who knew my mother. They really did know her - not just by reputation - because they had met at a prior show:

Here are people waiting for the very late bus:

I didn't know quite what this thing was but later figured out it must be where they store road construction equipment or maybe snowplows because I saw another one on the highway. I thought it looked interesting.

We took the bus back to our hotel at about 2:30 and my mother went back to our room to take a nap and get ready for the Special Preview Night of the Chicago International Show that night.
I had gotten ahold of Adrianne again to see if she would be interested in going back downtown with me again to walk along the Magnificent Mile while my mother rested.
So we met again somewhere around 3 o'clock at the train station and off we went!

Chicago Day 3 - Part 2

My mother was finished with her workshop and ready to go to the first of 3 miniatures shows. Here are some pics of her project at the end of the workshop:






That evening, my mother and I took a very expensive taxi ride over to Schaumburg to go to the opening night of the 3 Blind Mice Dollhouse & Miniatures show. The taxi ride over there was quite tense because our driver was a very nice Italian man who liked to talk with his hands – while driving! And he constantly looked in his rear view mirror to make sure we were listening and understanding what he was saying. All of this in rush-hour traffic – quite unnerving! We did, amazingly, get to the show in one piece. He only had to slam on the brakes once to keep from hitting the car in front of us :)

Here we are just after we got in the door. A very nice lady offered to take a picture of the two of us.


There were a lot of pretty miniatures there but I was very tired and just ended up finding places to sit and rest.





I could see a pond out the windows of the conference room where the show was so I went outside to sit for some more and caught a picture of the sun going down.


The ride back to the hotel was yet another adventure! Somehow, the dispatcher told the taxi driver ‘Ohare’ instead of ‘Marriot Ohare’. (or maybe he just didn't understand the dispatcher – who knows) We were already on our way into the airport when he asked us which flight we were taking. We were not paying attention to where we were going because we had been talking (and we didn't know our way around so we probably wouldn't have noticed anyway). We told him – no – no - we were not going to the airport but to the Marriott Ohare Hotel . So he drove around a bit more and took us to the Hilton at the airport. Again, we had to tell him that was not where we were going. My mother finally gave him the address of the Marriot Ohare – and he took us to the Marriot Suites – not the Hotel. Thankfully it was on the same street and not too far away but I had to tell him how to get there (luckily I had paid some attention when the Hotel Shuttle took us there the 1st day – it had stopped by the Marriot Suites before going to our Hotel.)
Quite an interesting couple of taxi rides!

Here is our trip back to the hotel. We simply needed to get from Point A to Point E!