Chicago Trip - Day 1

Day 1 – Our flight took off without a hitch. In the air, we saw some interesting clouds hovering over the ground not too far out of El Paso. I figure that had we been on the ground, we would have been in fog!

As we were descending in Chicago, it was a lot greener than I expected.

We arrived at the Hotel before lunch so we went ahead and ate lunch at the Hotel Restaurant. My mother had requested to have a refrigerator in our room but it was not there when we checked in so I called the front desk to remind them. They said it would cost an extra $30 and were we aware of that fact? When I mentioned this to my mother she was not too happy (can you say livid?) because the online site for the hotel says they are complimentary. She talked to somebody at the front desk who said the reason they were charging for them was because of the high demand during the miniatures show. We thought this was totally ridiculous but my mother had brought food and we had to have a place to put it!
Later that afternoon after a nap :), we peeked in on several workshops that were already in process.
That evening, we went ahead and “hopped” on the train (the train station was very close to the hotel) and went downtown to see what we could see. The funny thing was that about 2 stops later we realized that we didn't know the name of the stop where we had started. I looked at the map on the train and figured it out and then remembered that I had taken a picture with the name of the station that we could refer to if necessary.


While on the train we had no idea what stop to take so my mother asked some women riding with us who told us a good place to get off. We got off there and ended up in a sleek new-looking mall. It was very nice but not exactly what we were looking for. While in the mall we did have a delicious cream puff. I had never actually had one before (aside from miniature frozen ones at parties here and there).
After our snack we got back on the train and transferred to the Loop train (which takes a small loop around downtown - hence the name) and rode it around downtown and got off at a couple of stops. One of them was near the Harold Washington Library – there was some beautiful ornamentation way up on the corners and in the middle of the building. We thought the ones on the corners looked like owls, or dragons, but we really couldn't tell. (I found out later that they are owls surrounded by foliage).




By this time it was starting to get dark so we couldn’t see much of anything because the lights were on in the train, creating quite a glare – so we returned to the hotel.


This is the view from the train station right by our hotel. It is in the middle of the freeway!