Friday 27th June - Chicago Day 2

We were up and out fairly early (for us) this morning and walked probably almost a mile along the lake shore to The Field Museum - Chicago’s Natural History Museum. It was one of the best I have seen, and houses the biggest T-Rex ever found, called ‘Sue’! The ‘Museum Campus’ includes this museum, an aquarium and a planetarium, and is situated right next door to the huge ‘Soldier Field’ the home of the Chicago Bears NFL team on Lakeshore Drive. We have not had the time to visit either the aquarium or planetarium.

'Sue'

We spent a couple of hours at the museum. It was so big and there was so much to see that it would possibly take many visits to see all there is and to take the time to read the information alongside each display. We entered an ancient Egyptian tomb, walked through African villages, saw many hundreds of different (stuffed) animals and birds together with assorted mammal skeletons and took an ‘epic journey’ through 13,000 years of The Ancient Americas, including ice-age mammoth hunters, Native Americans, the Incas and the Aztecs etc. It was brilliantly laid out with interconnecting rooms. The building itself was enormous.

We could have spent longer there but we wanted to get tickets for the 1pm tall ship trip and were afraid it might get booked out early, so we hopped on a (again free) ‘hop on hop off’ bus back down to The Navy Pier. We were in good time and got the tickets with no problem. This was another of our ‘included attractions’ within the ‘Go Chicago’ card. We spent time on the pier looking at the Stained Glass exhibition, then had some lunch before boarding the ship. It was ‘pirate themed’ with stories etc being told on the main deck but we ignored those and just sat at the stern of the ship enjoying the sea breeze (very welcome in this heat) and views of Chicago’s fantastic skyline.

The trip lasted about an hour and we both really enjoyed it.

We took a water taxi back to our hotel area and spent time relaxing after another enjoyable day here on the shores of Lake Michigan.

We have worked out that had we paid for each ‘attraction’ and 2-day bus pass individually we would have spent $128 - so we saved $38 by buying the ‘Go Card’. So that was worth the investment and we intend to buy a similar one when we get to New York.

One final thing for today. For those of you who followed my 'Losing It' diet blog before I left home in April, you will see that the diet is still going really well:

'Rocky Road Dazzler' - Yummy!