Chicago - Background and the first day

We just got back from Chicago Wednesday night.

I don't think it will require as many separate posts as Disneyland to tell right, but it will certainly require more than one. We didn't really do anything on the first day, but there are some stories, so I will give that here, along with some background.

There were two main things that had me wanting to go, though it expanded. The first was that the Shedd Aquarium has belugas. I first saw a picture of what they called whistling whales in a book about dinosaurs in the library at my grade school. Along with one on pets, it was just one that I loved, and would return to over and over again. I have since seen belugas at Stanley Park, but still, this was a place where they were.

The other thing was from reading the script from The Ghost And The Darkness, and this quote:

"If you want to decide for yourself, you must go to America. They are at the Field Museum in Chicago, and even now, after they have been dead a century, if you dare to lock eyes with them...(beat)...you will be afraid."

I tried to feel fear. Nothing. William Goldman (the writer) is a bit of a blowhard though, and not above exaggeration.

So, there were those things, but we kept finding more things that were cool, and doable, and we decided to go. The preference was September, but we could not make the schedule work.

We left Saturday around 10 AM, which even with the time difference had us arriving in the early evening. We thought perhaps we could explore Millennium Park, or do something. That did not work out.

We arrived in the middle of a thunder storm. We don't usually get a lot of electricity in our storms out here in the Pacific Northwest. The Midwest is a whole other thing. We landed fine, but it was too dangerous for the ground crew to roll out the largely metal sleeve while the lightning was happening. First we waited on the tarmac, and then we waited in an alley behind our arrival gate, and then we finally got off. The book that I thought I would finish at the hotel that night, I finished on the plane.

As it was already late, and we did not know how long it would take us to get into the city, we ended up eating at the airport, then collected our bags and went to get a taxi. As we were working our way there, the airport felt somewhat stuffy, which was normal, but usually once you step outside that goes away. No, we had a wall of heat and humidity hit us. It was a sauna.

We nonetheless found a cab and made our way to the hotel. Traffic was bad, as rain tends to slow them down too. Anyway, once we checked in to our hotel, the Whitehall.

I originally booked with the Congress Plaza Hotel, which had a great location and decent reviews on Travelocity. Julie kept checking other travel sites though, and found a lot of negative comments on the cleanliness, to where she was not going to go if we did not change it. Everybody said the Whitehall was clean.

It was clean. It is also fairly old, which led to two things. One is that they are trying to get as much as they can into fairly small space. Our room was kind of built sideways, which makes it feel narrow, though the actual square footage is probably not that bad. Some things are actually pretty small, like bathrooms and elevators. It's not a big deal, but it might be hard on claustrophobics.

The other issue, also related to the age I am sure, is that there was no overhead lighting, so it was always kind of dark. We could totally still read, but I could never get any clear pictures. The remote control for the television was not very responsive, so changing channels and volume was very hard. The shower settings were frustrating.

These are minor things, and not that surprising. It's probably the oldest hotel we have ever stayed in. The housekeeping staff was great, the location was pretty good, and the prices were not unreasonable. We could have been much worse off.

Also, there were no bedbugs, lumpy spots in the carpet where you needed to keep your shoes on, weird odors, or any of the other horrors that Julie had read about. Although she did seem a little annoying at the time, discovering those things afterwards would have been bad.

We got settled in, read, and watched some Modern Family. It's not something that you get on a plane for, but it wasn't bad.