Enoch’s Thoughts

We visited Chicago last week. I mean, seriously visited, doing the whole tourist thing, partly because Becca wanted to show her guests as much of Chicago as possible, and partly just because. Me and my spouse and my sister and her daughter flew up Wednesday night, landed at O’Hare, rented a car, picked up my daughter at her walk-up in Ukrainian village, and drove immediately downtown to Pizzeria Uno. A short wait on the humid downtown streets paid off bigtime with a giant salad and a thick, Chicago-style pizza that we finally gave up on close to midnight.

Thursday morning we breakfasted at the hip Bongo Room (an omelette for me, plus a little of everyone else’s breakfast), then headed off to the Field Museum, featuring every conceivable dead animal known to science (plus a few inconceivable ones) and the amazing Sue, a nearly complete T-Rex skeleton discovered in 1990 in Utah by an archaeologist named (you guessed it) Sue! Next was the obligatory trip to Starbucks (a smoothie followed by a doppio. I totally confused the barista at first by ordering a “Duplo,” which, of course, refers to the large-sized Legos, not the large-sized espresso). We then took a 90-minute architectural boat tour of the Chicago River and Lake Michigan, amusingly and entertainingly narrated by Jen, who explained why Chicago’s river flows backwards, and how Chicago’s drinking water comes from cribs two miles off-shore in the lake (see real time crib weather data). We even went through the Chicago lock, because the Lake is two feet higher than the river. Famished, we ended the day with a trip through Portillo’s drive-thru for some real Chicago Hot Dogs to-go.

Friday morning, after a modest breakfast of left-over pizza, I dropped our guests off near the Bongo Room for some urban outfitting. An hour or so later, the rest of us picked them up, stopped at Panera for brunch (2nd breakfast?), then met Scott, a firefighter married to one of Becca’s co-workers and a most gracious host, for an exciting afternoon of sailing on the southern part of Lake Michigan in a 28-foot Catalina. Scott let me take the helm most of the day, and by the time I finally decided to turn around, the wind had picked up out of the southwest, we were way out beyond one of the water cribs, and were probably 4 hours of long tacking from the marina. Sailors hate having to crank the motor, but they hate even more having cranky riders. So to avoid that, we dropped the ol’ mains’l, fired up Scott’s Atomic motor (“atomic” referring to the manufacturer, not the fuel), and motored back through gusts up to 30 mph and waves several feet high. To the girls riding on the bow, it was like an amusement park ride, and it was pretty exciting for me and Scott for that matter. An exhilarating sail in a beautiful setting.

After the sail, we retreated to Scott’s family boat docked in the Hammond Marina to wait out an intense, fast-moving thunderstorm. As soon as the clouds cleared, we were all off to Whiting for the 16th annual Pierogi Festival. For people who didn’t know what a pierogi was before this weekend, we had ourselves a fine time, walking up and down Whiting’s main street, utterly failing to resist the Polish delicacies that tempted us with every step. The addition of live polka music topped the whole night off, and we could barely drag ourselves back home and up to the 3rd-floor walk-up.

As if we had absolutely no sense at all, we got up Saturday morning and walked to the Flying Saucer for a hipster breakfast. (I had La Bazza, advertised as the “Rolls Royce of vegetarian breakfast bowls.” It included rice, beans, fried eggs, kale, cauliflower, tofu and some more minor stuff I either didn’t recognize or can’t remember. They threatened to take away my Vegetarian License, though, when I added some leftover bacon that the rest of the group couldn’t finish. Fortunately, they let me off with merely a hip scowl.)

From the Saucer we flew back downtown to the so-called “ART INSTITVTE OF CHICAGO” (that’s really how they spell it) and settled in for an afternoon of culture. What a collection! Even at a near trot, we ran out of time way before we ran out of things to see – Van Gogh, Picasso, Monet, Okeeffe, Gaugin, not to mention artifacts from India, Egypt, and Native America. I just tried to take in the images, like Chuck, except this Intersect was all about art. We left the Art Institvte as it was closing down, just in time to see Cloudgate, a sculpture in Millennium Park that strongly resembles a giant, chrome-plated legume.

The last stop on our whirlwind tour of the Windy City was Navy Pier, where we rode the giant ferris wheel, and settled in for a long luxurious seafood dinner at Riva, overlooking the pier and the lock. (It was soft-shelled crab and halibut for me. Yep, you guessed it – just for the halibut.) After picking up a few souvenirs and once again successfully negotiating Chicago’s gridded streets, we wound up collapsed at Becca’s place watching The Proposal to unwind. (OK, it is definitely a chick flick, but in case you’ve lost count, the chick-to-dude ratio was 5-to-1.)

For my faithful readers who are wondering “didn’t he do anything technical the whole trip?”, as a matter of fact, I unclogged 2 drains and fixed the toilet paper holder.

So there.

All photos by Jayne.