Day Two in Chicago

Following a long lie in, the Don went and caught up with some local Chicago based family whilst the rest of the gang headed down town to do the tourist stuff.

The Rabbit took us on a misguided mission to find the Boeing building which we found the following day. It’s a very boring typical office building with no redeeming features at all.

We headed to the Millennium Park to see how Chicago made Melbourne’s Federation Square look like a total white elephant.

However its worth pointing out that Vics actually did a better job in the end because Millennium Park was finished two years after the year 2000 in a major embarrassment.

Chicago’s cool buildings combined with this impressive park and Chicago’s answer to Adelaide’s Mall’s Balls make this a seriously cool city.

In a truly unexpected moment we paid a whirlwind visit to the internationally acclaimed art gallery where we attempted to prove to each other that we knew something about the subject.

Despite Chicago’s large population The Rabbit bumped into The Don and his relatives in the art gallery and both road-trippers claimed they were only in the art gallery to look for a toilet and went on their respective ways.

Afterwards we visited some blues-brothers landmarks including the Daley Plaza where about 56,000 police, soldiers, firefighters and highway patrolmen pursued Jake and Elwood for their various atrocities.

We met up with The Don and got a tip that we should go to the outer suburbs for some ribs at a place called Smoque. Unfortunately the queue for the place extended out the door and we decided to head to an Italian restaurant down the road.

This was a move worse than Hitler’s decision to create a war on two fronts.

The food was enormous in quantity and barely edible. However the worst aspect was musical, not culinary. The piano accordion player proceeded to play 50’s classics while drunk and attempting to sing at the same time. While the road-trippers were under-whelmed by their Italian experience in the ‘burbs, at the table next to them a young couple signed up to a lifetime of romance.

We settled the bill in record time and made a break for a traditional Chicago blues bar. The classic blues was headlined by a talented diva mixing between Janis Joplin and Dusty Springfield. Meanwhile the bar workers were putting the drinks away faster than the road-trippers could order next drinks.

After a suitably large gutful of beer and blues we headed home at the end of another day of American adventures.