September 19th & 20th 2009 Saturday afternoon we left Chicago and flew over the vast desert on our way to Los Angeles. We spent a night in the Rennaissance Hotel at the airport which was real luxury compared to the hostels and treated ourselves to a really lovely meal with a bottle of wine to celebrate arriving in California. After picking up the hire car on Sunday morning, the rest of the day was spent driving to our overnight stop in Barstow. ...
September 16th 2009 On Wednesday we headed north of downtown Chicago up to Lincoln Park, a really nice leafy suburb with a university. We sat by the lily pond in the park and enjoyed our picnic lunch. Then we headed into the park zoo which is free. We didn’t stay in the zoo for long, it was like something out of the dark ages. Having visited places like Marwell where the animals have large areas to use this was really sad because all the big cats we saw just had small cages and were all pacing back and forth. It was too upsetting to stay so we left having only seen the cats. ...
September 18th 2009 Our last day in Chicago and we decided to take one of the free tours of Millenium Park, since we had already spent so much time there we thought it would be good to learn some more about it. Some of the highlights were ‘Cloud Gate’ or the ‘Bean’ as the locals refer to it which is the first outdoor public installation in the USA by the British artist, Anesh Kapoor. The 110-ton elliptical sculpture is forged of a seamless series of highly polished stainless steel plates, which reflect the city’s famous skyline and the clouds above. ...
September 17th 2009 Up early this morning to visit the Chicago Museum of Science and Industry, the largest science museum in the Western hemisphere. We kicked off our visit with a tour of the Harry Potter exhibition featuring many of the props from the films. I even got to try the sorting hat on and got sorted into Ravenclaw (for the bright people!) I really enjoyed, the exhibition was really well laid out and staged with various ‘wizards’ popping up from time to time to guide you through and excerpts from the films showing amoung the props. A thoroughly enjoyable hour. ...
September 15th 2009 The hostel in Chicago is much bigger and much less friendly than our little home in Toronto, and doesn’t offer the cooking facilities we were hoping for, but it’s clean which is the main thing. It also provides free breakfast which although basic is enough to get you started. The Millenium Park in Chicago is an area dedicated to art, music, architecture and landscape design. There are free tours of the park available which we plan to take later in the week. They also hold free lunchtime concerts every day all through the summer until the end of September. ...
September 13th & 14th It was our last day in Toronto today. We needed to be at the bus station for about 5pm to catch our bus to Chicago, and had to vacate our room at the hostel by 11am, so we packed up our stuff and left it at the hostel and headed back down to the Music Garden by Lakeside. We had a couple of pleasant hours sat here reading books in the sun before heading back to the hostel to have a late lunch and grab our bags for the 20 minute walk to the bus station. ...