Stop # 12- The Windy City

When going to a city you have never been to before it is hard to know what would be good for our family to do while visiting...We asked a lot of local Chicago folks as we ran into them throughout of other visits. They would always list Navy Pier & Millennium Park, so that is where we started!!
We rode the L from our hotel to the downtown area and walked to Navy Pier. Our kids had a great time in their Children's Museum. The picture above show a few of the things that the kids were able to do. They had a great fire truck and fire station for the kids to play with as well as the vanilla smoke filled room for the kids to practice crawling through. Adam went down the fireman pole and Alex enjoyed playing with the fire hose. Adam was able to play palaeontologist again and Addison enjoyed dressing up at a lot of the stations. The slide that she is going down in the picture would play music as she slide down the slide!!

After having fun in the Museum we headed out into the Crystal Gardens which are fountains with the water that flies over your heads and across the room. Adam held Amelia while standing for a photo for the first time! After we took a few pictures we headed out to ride the ferris wheel. The pictures above show the view that we had while on our ride :)

We walked from the Navy Pier to Millennium Park. We came in on the south end of the park and the first thing we saw was the stage where bands were practicing for a concert that evening. When I asked Adam what he wanted to do his response was to see the bean. I had no idea what the bean was...as we kept walking there it was...a huge silver bean!! You can obviously see your reflection in the bean which makes taking photos very fun. I had heard about a fountain in the park that had huge faces of 1000 people that lived in the Chicago area that squirted water and I wanted to see that!! The kids were able to go put their feet in the water as Dad took pictures of this incredible fountain. What a great place to cool off on a hot summers day. Adam found some art titled Made in China. He of course needed his picture take in front of the dinosaur and yes, it did say on it Made in China!!

After seeing everything that we wanted to at Millennium Park we started to walk over to the Willis building (Sears Tower). As we were getting closer we were asked to go a different route because they were filming Transformers 3. We walked a few blocks east and found the Chicago Trade Center, Adam couldn't resist getting a photo! The Willis building is 103 floors and they have added the glass walkouts. We had fun seeing the sights, we were told that we could see 4 states while we were looking out. Addison was surprised to see the grass on top of the buildings, but when she would see the pools on the top of the buildings she would think they were ground level!! Adam was a little nervous at first, but he ended up walking onto the glass for a few pictures. Dadam enjoyed playing with Amelia as you can see! The rides in the elevators were fun as well. They had short films to watch as you went up and down. As we left the Willis Tower and hopped back on the L to the hotel it started to rain. The rain continued to fall and when we got off the L and started to walk back to the hotel ( 3 blocks away) a cab stopped and offered us a ride. When we arrived back to the hotel he wouldn't even accept a tip. We were and are very grateful to that kind man. I am grateful there are still wonderful people like that in the world.

My husband has been a Cubs fan since he was a little boy. His mom has a painting of him as a young boy hanging in her home and he is wearing his cubs jacket. We couldn't go to Chicago and not see Wrigley Field. The Cubs were out of town, but we were able to see the stadium that just so happens to be on Addison St.
The food in Chicago lived up to it's reputation! We enjoyed our pizza, I was amazed by the sauce, it wasn't heavy and thick. The sauce was light and very fresh, which I loved. As for the Chicago Dog...well we don't recommend the ones at Navy Pier! We do however recommend Murphy's Red Hots by Wrigley Field. We enjoyed many different types of hot dogs there and each of them were wonderful.
Chicago was a great town with so much history. We could and I am sure will visit again :)