Day 7 & 8

Well, so much for blogging daily!  But, I promise I have a good excuse!  Chicago day was busy and we didn’t get home until midnight and then yesterday was, well, busy…but more on that in a second.

So, Chicago!  The Windy City, though it didn’t seem to have more wind than any other place we’d driven the last few days, was cold.  Single-digits-plus-wind kind of cold.  It was rather unpleasant.  But, backing up, my aunt Judy had offered to keep Levi for the day so that we be more free to enjoy ourselves in Chicago, which was wonderful!  Levi enjoyed the day off just playing, anyway.  Our lunch plans were cancelled at the last minute, so we had a leisurely morning and hit the road around 11am.  We picked up my friend, Andree, in North Chicago and made our way downtown.  Our first stop was lunch at Portillo’s, a famous hot dog place.  It was a neat place to eat, but also had some amazing food.  I got a beef and cheddar sandwich on a croissant that was the best sandwich I’ve ever eaten.  Ever.

After leaving there, Matthew and Andree (and Amelia) let me indulge in my geeky side and we went over to the Second City theater.  Second City is tiny, but the people that have started their careers there have been huge.  Half of the cast of Saturday Night Live started sketch and improv comedy there, as well as several other famous comedians: Stephen Colbert, Steve Carrel, even way back: Peter Boyle, who was in my favorite show of all time, Everybody Loves Raymond.  Anyway, I was super excited to see the lobby and look at all of the pictures and experience the nostalgia.  And I was grateful that Matthew and Andree went along with it.

Later that evening the four of us had dinner with another couple at a great classic Chicago pizza place.  Us three girls had gone to school together for a long time (a long time ago) and it was fun to reconnect and that they both happen to be living in Chicago now while their husbands go to medical school.  We were able to catch up and share our upcoming adventure with them.  And, of course, Amelia was an angel

It was a late evening, like I said, and we didn’t get home until midnight.

And then there was yesterday.  I woke in the middle of the night and was up on and off very sick.  The morning I spent in bed while Matthew packed our things and Levi was spoiled (in a good way) by Judy.  We didn’t get on the road until around 11:30am and it was already snowing.  The roads weren’t really that bad, but the traffic down through Milwaukee and Chicago was awful.  It took us five hours to get a mere 150 miles!  But we kept trekking because it was supposed to go from snow to ice and we wanted to be as far as possible.  We drove until 1am when things suddenly went from snowy and decent roads to icy just south of Indianapolis.  We called our hosts, who are on the Kentucky side just outside Cincinnati, and let them know we wouldn’t be coming in until the morning.

We found a hotel just as the roads got really terrible and now it’s just after 8am and both kids are still sleeping.  We’re about to head out to breakfast and then make our way the last two hours to our destination.  I’ll have to post the pictures another time.