1.7.2012 – 1.7.2012  38 °C

A nice lazy start today for our first day in downtown Chicago. We started the morning by taking a stroll down to Millennium park. The way we entered the park meant that the first site we had was this huge amoeba type silver thing. It is a really cool sculpture that reflects the surrounding sky scape. It is highly polished so you can see the whole city behind you on this big upside down domey thing. Super cool! Like every other tourist in town we spent awhile playing around with taking photos of ourselves and stuff before we continued our walk up and over this yellow brick road type bridge to Grant Park.

The park had an art show on so we spent an hour or so wandering thru the exhibitors. I get slightly depressed when I see awesome photographers… I guess it keeps you grounded! I’m in no way at the point where I could actually sell my photos for a profit.. I guess I’ll have to keep giving them away!! Probably the highlight of the art exhibition was the free sorbet we got from the Samsung Galaxy exhibitors.. That in no way reflects on the quality of art work (because it was really, really good) it’s more the fact that it is again HOT so any coolness is super welcome!!

We left the art show after seeing about half of it as it was just too hot to be walking around in the sun. We headed over to the big fountain to take some shots before we headed into town searching for some lunch. We were walking along State St when we just plain got sick of walking and decided to find ourselves a bus to take us somewhere… basically anywhere, just hop on an air conded bus and get out of the heat for a while!!!

We had the grand plan of getting on the bus out to Navy Pier (one of the touristy spots in town).. We waited awhile and finally got sick of it so just hopped on the next bus coming past. That is one of the good (and slightly annoying) things about catching a random bus.. you just never know where you’re going to end up!! Well, we ended up way north of the city (thankfully right near a train station). The bus trip was actually quite good; it took us all the way up the lake side of Chicago. The lakeside is all parkland so it’s quite nice to see such a huge public green space right on the lake. We went a good 20km up the lake and the park was still going.. how lucky are local Chicago-ans? Whilst we were on the bus a huge storm blew up over the city.. Many a time on the bus we were thanking our lucky stars that we weren’t out in the storm… Not that it rained much, but it BLEW.. and it was SO black…

We finally made it back to our digs and we stopped at the local mkt to grab something for a pretty late lunch. Thankfully, the storm had dropped the temp significantly (to the point where I was hunting for a jumper!!!) so it was now quite pleasant to wander around town again.

The rest of my afternoon/ evening was spent in the room having a rest, blogging and watching some tv. D and M headed back outside to go and see a show (Million Dollar Quartet)—apparently the show was really good! I had a really nice and relaxing arvo and I am now feeling refreshed for another big, hot day of walking around the town!

Song of the Day– Frank Sinatra, My Kind of Town