honeymoon details
lol nag nag nag Tae, I've been meaning to post this since we got back, but it's been horrifically busy, if you'd not needled me I'd never have gotten this posted!
Also helps it's a slow day at work, and I'm stuck here until close because my counterpart is out today. We got permission to do summer hours, which means we get every other Friday off completely. As long as there's at least one of us here for emergencies (and yes, there can be documentation emergencies) and we get our hours in, we can get away with this. This means I have a 3-day workweek next week :>
We stopped at the House on the Rock on the way from the Dells to Chicago, and spent a good piece of time running through it, pointing and oohing. I'm a huge fan of the old music machines, and the musical rooms that are a feature are really cool; we got $5 in tokens and went nuts. E was speechless towards the end; it's a lot to take in visually, and he was thinking so hard he ended up napping in the car while I was driving. A lot of the conversation while he was awake was around the question "If you were to design a House on the Rock of your own, what rooms would you have in them?"
We got into Chicago later in the afternoon/early evening. Checked in and unloaded stuff in our room, which was on the 15th floor and have a canal/lake view. Very nice. We cleaned up and walked to Navy Pier for dinner- ended up eating at Riva, which is a steakhouse out on the pier. Nice but expensive, we got the chateaubriand and grilled vegetables- it's carved tableside, so it was fun to watch.
Got up the next morning and began bumming around Chicago. Walked to the Art Institute, getting a little lost in the process, but got some good exercise; saw the big exhibit there right now, on the painting of Seurat's "Sunday on Grand Jatte". The exhibit was cool, they'd assembled a lot of his small studies and painting of people that inspired him- very well curated. One thing that I'd not really thought of was the effect of pigment aging- they had a computer reconstruction of the painting as it would have appeared at the time of painting- much brighter and overwhelming. Also saw the artifacts and Chagall windows and spent a lot of time in the oriental art galleries.
While we were in the Institute, it began to rain. We caught the free tourist shuttle to the Shedd Aquarium and spent the afternoon there. Ethan had not been there since the new addition was added, so we had a lot of fun exploring and looking at all the fish. (One of the rooms in our House on the Rock would be an aquarium, with lots of saltwater tanks.) There's a funny fountain outside, of a man hugging a human-sized fish (I won't even go into the comments we made here), that we got some pictures of.
After the Shed, we were ready for dinner- so we went to Shaw's Crab House for dinner. Peel and eat shrimp and big piles of crab and mai tais. Mmmm. It was still raining, so we went back to the hotel and whiled away the evening reading to each other.
The next day's weather was much better for touristy ventures. After a free breakfast (some minor griping about an inattentive concierge got us breakfast vouchers) we checked out of the hotel and drove to the Field Museum. Looked at gems and minerals, spent a lot of time in the Egypt exhibit (extremely well done, I might add), and visited the special exhibit of the Treasures of the Forbidden City- life in the city for the last of the great emperors of imperial China. Very, very cool, and worth every cent we paid to go- most of the artifacts had never left the Forbidden City before, let alone China.
After that we went to the Museum of Science and Industry- it's more of a kid's museum, but it was still a lot of fun. Saw the Imax show on natural disasters, goofed around in the genetics exhibit looking at the mutants on display (they have a rotating stock of cloned mice and engineered frogs and chickens). When we'd finished up there we went to Andy's dinner party- it was good to hang out with him and Ted and Mary, and meet Mary's husband. We drove as far north as we had energy for and crashed at a cheap motel late in the evening, then took off for the Cities Wednesday morning.
Also helps it's a slow day at work, and I'm stuck here until close because my counterpart is out today. We got permission to do summer hours, which means we get every other Friday off completely. As long as there's at least one of us here for emergencies (and yes, there can be documentation emergencies) and we get our hours in, we can get away with this. This means I have a 3-day workweek next week :>
We stopped at the House on the Rock on the way from the Dells to Chicago, and spent a good piece of time running through it, pointing and oohing. I'm a huge fan of the old music machines, and the musical rooms that are a feature are really cool; we got $5 in tokens and went nuts. E was speechless towards the end; it's a lot to take in visually, and he was thinking so hard he ended up napping in the car while I was driving. A lot of the conversation while he was awake was around the question "If you were to design a House on the Rock of your own, what rooms would you have in them?"
We got into Chicago later in the afternoon/early evening. Checked in and unloaded stuff in our room, which was on the 15th floor and have a canal/lake view. Very nice. We cleaned up and walked to Navy Pier for dinner- ended up eating at Riva, which is a steakhouse out on the pier. Nice but expensive, we got the chateaubriand and grilled vegetables- it's carved tableside, so it was fun to watch.
Got up the next morning and began bumming around Chicago. Walked to the Art Institute, getting a little lost in the process, but got some good exercise; saw the big exhibit there right now, on the painting of Seurat's "Sunday on Grand Jatte". The exhibit was cool, they'd assembled a lot of his small studies and painting of people that inspired him- very well curated. One thing that I'd not really thought of was the effect of pigment aging- they had a computer reconstruction of the painting as it would have appeared at the time of painting- much brighter and overwhelming. Also saw the artifacts and Chagall windows and spent a lot of time in the oriental art galleries.
While we were in the Institute, it began to rain. We caught the free tourist shuttle to the Shedd Aquarium and spent the afternoon there. Ethan had not been there since the new addition was added, so we had a lot of fun exploring and looking at all the fish. (One of the rooms in our House on the Rock would be an aquarium, with lots of saltwater tanks.) There's a funny fountain outside, of a man hugging a human-sized fish (I won't even go into the comments we made here), that we got some pictures of.
After the Shed, we were ready for dinner- so we went to Shaw's Crab House for dinner. Peel and eat shrimp and big piles of crab and mai tais. Mmmm. It was still raining, so we went back to the hotel and whiled away the evening reading to each other.
The next day's weather was much better for touristy ventures. After a free breakfast (some minor griping about an inattentive concierge got us breakfast vouchers) we checked out of the hotel and drove to the Field Museum. Looked at gems and minerals, spent a lot of time in the Egypt exhibit (extremely well done, I might add), and visited the special exhibit of the Treasures of the Forbidden City- life in the city for the last of the great emperors of imperial China. Very, very cool, and worth every cent we paid to go- most of the artifacts had never left the Forbidden City before, let alone China.
After that we went to the Museum of Science and Industry- it's more of a kid's museum, but it was still a lot of fun. Saw the Imax show on natural disasters, goofed around in the genetics exhibit looking at the mutants on display (they have a rotating stock of cloned mice and engineered frogs and chickens). When we'd finished up there we went to Andy's dinner party- it was good to hang out with him and Ted and Mary, and meet Mary's husband. We drove as far north as we had energy for and crashed at a cheap motel late in the evening, then took off for the Cities Wednesday morning.