Last weekend Nathan and i took a little road trip to Chicago, much like the one we took two years ago. In fact, we stayed at the same B&B in Oak Park—but this time we stayed in the suite with the whirlpool tub and fireplace! It was worth the extra cost.
We arrived at the B&B Friday evening, showered up and headed into the Lincoln Park area for dinner and a show. We parked near the Riviera Theatre and walked to Spacca Napoli for some authentic Italian pizza. (I chose this over deep-dish for two reasons: 1. there didn’t seem to be any good deep-dish places near the theater and i only wanted to deal with parking once, and 2. Spacca Napoli is supposed to be one of the best places to eat in Chicago.) As it turned out, it would’ve been much more pleasant to park twice rather than walking the mile-or-so to the pizza place, because it was much colder than we had anticipated. Note to self: even if it broke freezing during the day, always WEAR YOUR FRIGGIN’ HAT AT NIGHT during February in the Midwest. Duh!
The frigid walk was worth it for the delectable pizza & excellently paired Italian wine, and a little reconfiguring of garments and seemingly less wind made the walk back to the theater a lot more pleasant. Oh—except that we were very unpleasantly surprised to find, once we got there, that the theater was dark and closed, and the show had been postponed until February 14th. MONDAY. As in, the day we got back to work. UGH! I had been extremely excited to see Robyn, but alas, once again—just like when we traveled to see Ume in Iowa City last fall—my hopes and dreams were shattered on the cold pavement because the band had had to cancel the show that night. I vowed in that moment never to travel outside of Des Moines to see an indie band again, but i have since received a prompt reimbursement for my tickets and realized that Robyn’s concert was not our main objective for the Chicago trip. Besides, all that cold wind and disappointment made the fireplace and the whirlpool tub back at the B&B feel pretty much like heaven.
Saturday we took the El into the city and found our way to the Chicago Auto Show. There were a lot of shiny cars. Some of them were pretty. This one was my favorite:
The Audi somethingorother
And this was Nathan’s favorite:
The gull-wing Mercedes Spyder thing
As you can tell, that part was for Nathan. 
Then we went to the Field Museum of Natural History, where we saw a lot of amazing remains, including Sue the Tyrannosaurus Rex, plenty of stuffed animals including a couple of enormous elephants, and a the bones of Lucy, our oldest-known common ancestor (as humans).
These are the real fossils (minus the skull, which is upstairs)!
I could hardly believe that these were real, they were so huge.
Lucy, on the other hand, was surprisingly tiny.
As i was looking at a display that placed a human skeleton and an ape skeleton side-by-side to point out their similarities and differences, i overheard a man and his fifteen-or-so-year-old son reassuring themselves that there’s “no way” that people really evolved. Period. And i just couldn’t believe that a person could stand there and look at the actual fossils and the skeletons and read the very easy-to-understand-and-attractively-displayed explanations of how exactly evolution works and how it’s so strongly evidenced and how it’s still happening and how the scientific community really has no doubt about it, and still staunchly refuse to accept it. How do you take your child to a museum—a place of learning—and tell him that it’s all lies and not to believe any of it? But at least they were there, in the museum. A lot of people would simply stay away from the things they disbelieve. I almost said something to them but i didn’t trust myself not to get angry about it and push them even further away from understanding.
We only got through about 1/3 of the museum before we had to head back to Oak Park to get ready for dinner. We had chosen an Italian restaurant within walking distance of our B&B (and yes i wore a hat this time) called Cuccina Paradisio. The food was very enjoyable and somewhat imaginative, and we polished off a bottle of wine with it to make the walk worthwhile. The next day we stopped by IKEA on our way home again and picked up several lamps and things, and then i read to Nathan from Breaking Dawn on the not-so-terribly-long drive back home. It was a nice, relatively relaxing little trip, and now we’re ready to pack up the remainder of our things and move into our new house in less than two weeks! I’ll have plenty to say about that once the move is done, i’m sure.
Tuesday, February 15th, 2011 2:21 pm • road trips, travel
RSS 2.0 feed •
leave a comment •
trackback
February 16th, 2011 at 3:56 pm
sounds like you had a really nice weekend! i miss fun road trips to chicago. and deep dish pizza! yum!! i also like the photo of lucy — nice light.
February 16th, 2011 at 4:20 pm
I should’ve mentioned that i didn’t take any of these photos; i just borrowed them from other people’s websites.
It’s nice to have some big cities within driving distance.
And it’s kinda nice to come home to a much smaller city!