Chicago!

After four years of going without, Zack finally got Spring Break!!  We drove down to Chicago for a few days and had a great time!!  We arrived late Thursday night and were too late to really do anything besides grabbing a quick bite and walking around and exploring the city. 

We made our plans for Friday and headed out first thing to Millenium Park to see "the bean".  The bean, I learned, is pretty new to Chicago.  It was built from 2004-2006.  It is pretty neat since it is reflective on all sides!  It has even made an appearance in a few movies since (The Vow anyone?).  It is pretty cool and definitely a fun and FREE tourist attractions.  Pretty fascinating. 

After that we had worked up an appetite so we went to eat some famous chicago deep dish pizza from none other than Giordano's.  It takes 35-40 minutes to bake one of these deep dish pizza's so Zack and I took turns taking Elise oustide to play while we waited for our food.  It finally arrived and the wait was well worth it :)  It was probably at least 3 inches tall.  It also goes a long way- we got a small and still had leftovers!!

Above is the Sears (pronounced Willis) Tower.  We were too cheap to pay to go to the very top ($18 per person-yikes!).  It was essentially across from Giordano's so Elise and I went inside the lobby, saw the lego tower replica and took a free brochure...basically the same thing as going to the top, right?!

After lunch we had to take a break back at the hotel so miss Elise could take a nap- which was fine with Zack so he could watch March Madness.  When she woke up we started to head over to Navy Pier and stopped by the giant Marilyn Monroe statue and the Tribune Tower.  The Tower is a neat building that has stones from famous places from all over the world.  Here is a shout to my home land of Utah!  Can you guess which stone they used?!

If you guess granite from the Salt Lake Temple then you are right!!  I guess it wasn't too hard though!

We got to Navy Pier and decided to take a ride on the ferris wheel!  It is still early in the season so most other rides on the pier were closed but we had a great time on it and got to see a beautiful view of the city as well. 

Here is another view from Navy Pier.  About 10 seconds after this picture was taken we had a HUGE downpour of rain that lasted for a half hour.  This was fortunate because it made us take cover underneath and realized there were a milllion shops, stores, museums and other things inside. It was really cool!

After waiting around for a while we ventured outside to play in the puddles :)  Here is our proof of the rain storm.Good thing it didn't last long since we didin't bring any kind of jacket with us!

After the pier we decided to have dinner at Rain Forest Cafe.  Zack had never been there before and we thought that Elise would get a kick out of all the random rain showers, gorillas and elephants making noise.  The picture of her above with the frog kinda sums up how she felt about it.  She just stared and looked intrigued.  Not happy, not sad just very interested.  Either way she was entertained and we got to enjoy a meal. 

After dinner we walked some of the "magnificent mile" and took this great picture of the city and the Chicago river.  Next up- the parade!

Next morning was the St. Patrick's day parade and man...does this city go ALL OUT!!!  Every person we saw was wearing all sorts of green.  Not even just the clothes but necklaces, hats, sunglasses- it's a big deal!!  They even dye the Chicago River green for the occasion!  It was pretty cool.  We got to the parade an hour early to stake out a good spot. Elise had fun playing with Daddy's sunglasses while we waited for it to begin. 

It started out with a bang or in this case bagpipes.  We tried to stay and watch the entire parade but Elise was tired and hot (it was 80 degrees!) and there weren't enough marching bands and loud exciting things happening to keep her interested so we had to leave a little early!

I wore blue on purpose (no, not really) so that Zack could easily find me in the crowd of green!  Here we are waiting for the parade to begin!  We had a GREAT time in Chicago and definitely plan to go back many times while we are so close.