My kind of town --Chicago is?

 And so begins a second attempt to have a good time in the “second city” of America.  The last time that John and I tried to be tourists in Chicago and our first visit to the city were marred by the demolishing of Chicago’s lone deer by my car, followed by a freezing trip around a very 

windy city with Mistee, followed by a quick trip home in a smashed car to see how bad the damage from the tornado back home was…it did not endear us to this town and we have since only tried to go through it mainly.  Which, as anyone who has been here knows, you don’t go through Chicago.  You sit and look at it on the freeways and highways at a slow crawl…

John's capture of our lake view hotel room

To start a new experience in this town, we didn’t bring the car.  Makes sense when most of my problems with this town involve one…We stopped in Michigan City and hit a bargain barn that Ali knew about before parking the cars there and catching the train into Millennium Park.  I couldn't help thinking that Americans would be so into mass transit if it was like a train in Europe and comparing the two, but John reminded me that I shouldn't do that.  We were whisked  moved around Lake Michigan without traffic and

with a bathroom available for the low price of $8.50 a person(and given the price of gas now, this was amazing prices people) and came up in downtown Chicago.  Very slick and no deer blood on the car…On the train ride we were able to look at our 50 walks in Chicago set to see what we could feasibly do in the couple of days that we had.  We picked a couple on the train, checked into the hotel and while Ali went to her conference, we went exploring.