Living the good life in Grandmaville: Standing on Chicago, cross that off my Bucket List

I have had some good times on my visits to Chicago over the years. Started in eighth grade with two class trips, one to some historical churches and one to The Museum of Science and Industry. Then we took the girls when they were about seven and five. We stayed in a downtown hotel, took a crazy cab ride, and enjoyed zoos and museums. John and I returned for an anniversary, not sure which, but it was years ago. We stayed in a downtown hotel and visited museums, Navy Pier, and the Sears Tower. We visited the planetarium and Sears Tower with our good friends, the Kovach family when the girls were about ten and eight. That was another good trip. We took Mallory to the Sears Tower and The Museum of Science and Industry in 2002. Mal was afraid to go up in the Sears Tower on that trip, too close to 9/11 I believe. My mom, Lynne, the girls, and various other parties visited Chicago for three years straight in December with the Linsmeier bus group. I always enjoyed those trips each one different and unique in its own way. Finally, Courtney, Alissa, Mal, and I rode the train to Chicago in two consecutive Augusts for shopping. Those trips were so much fun and included silly times involving tarts, free diet coke, bathroom stops, booties, new shoes, just to name a few. We still laugh about those memories.
Anyway, I really wanted to go back to Chicago and walk out on the glass walkway in the Sears Tower. After some convincing, John said he would go with me as long as we took the train which we did. It was a great trip with a few glitches thrown in for good measure, of course.
In the above photo, you can see us on the train on the ride down. That part of the trip was uneventful.

Upon arriving in Chicago, we walked the short distance to the Sears Tower and after battling large crowds and some confusion with the security checkpoint and waiting for the elevator we made it to the 103rd floor.

There who long lines waiting to walk out on the glass, but we patiently waited our turn. When we got up there, John's new camera wasn't working. Now I did not come all this way and wait in that long line to not have a picture. I used my camera and the cell phone, John was upset, thinking the security machine had ruined his card in the camera. I did not get to take in the full feeling of the glass since I had to go and calm him down. The above picture was actually taken with John's camera which was miraculousy fixed by a young woman from Australia, I believe she was heavensent. Anyway after she turned one little setting on his camera, it worked and we waited in an even longer line to go back out on the glass walkway. This time it was worth every minute of the wait.

Here are my feet standing on Chicago. I think they look like they are dangling in mid air here. We took many, many foot pictures and other shots from the walkway. We definitely took our sweet time once we got out there.

This is the picture that the young lady from Australia took of us to make sure that she had fixed John's camera. All she ask in return was that John take a photo of her and her friends. That was easy enough and small payment for saving our day.
We spent about two hours up there just looking around and enjoying all the views, bought a few souvenirs, and headed to the "going down" line for the elevators. Yep, you guessed it, it was long. I swear every family, every old person, every foreigner was up in the tower that day. Anyway we waited to go down. When it was our turn they directed us to a service elevator. We were packed in there and it went so slowly. We thought we were all the way down, but we were actually only on the 63rd floor and had to be herded to another service elevator and then yet, another service elevator which finally took us to the bottom floor. Our journey was not yet over since we then had to ride an elevator up to the ground level and get out of that place! It was craziness!

When we exited the Sears Tower, we were looking a bathroom, a simple bathroom. Macdonald's, NO, had to purchase something and get a key, Subway, NO, only for employees, Barnes and Noble, NO, had to purchase something and get a key. Since it was not an emergency, we found this cute little Italian place where we had some yummy calzones and diet cokes which will now go right through us. I looked for the location of the bathrooms in this restaurant and there weren't any! How crazy is that? So we moved on.

We arrived at Grant Park and found public bathrooms, clean, free, open, no purchase necessary. YES! Making a mental note of this one.

This is the fountain from the opening of the Married with Children show. Finally an area that was not so full of people. We were enjoying the beautiful day at this point.

We happened upon two events, not sure if these were weddings or maybe those fifteen year old coming out parties. At any rate, the dresses were big and beautiful as were the girls wearing them. Worst case scenario, they were gypsies from the show, "My big fat gypsy wedding."

This girl in pink just seemed too young to a getting married and why all those boys and no bridesmaids. I suppose we will never know.

We took a nice walk by the lake and took this photo of Navy Pier. We did not walk all the way to the Pier because it would have made for a long trek back and our feet were already a bit tired.

We took the river walk back to Michigan Avenue and found the Blackhawk store for Mallory. We may or may not have purchased a few items.

Then we found Millenium Park and the big silver bean. This is us reflected in the bean.

Just some more bean shots.

There was a huge brick wall sprinkler in this park, too. Water just poured down the sides of the wall.

This is a shot of all the people wading and cooling off between the two walls. This wall has a picture of a face on it that we did not notice until we looked at the photos.