The drive from Minneapolis to Chicago was nice - at first. We left after rush hour and stopped at our favorite rest stop in Menomonie, WI for sandwiches (it's on the way to Chippewa Falls, which we are compelled to visit the last weekend of every July). It started spitting rain while we ate, which was OK since the picnic tables were under little pavilions. Not an hour later the rain had increased to the point where seeing the car in front of us was a challenge, particularly if it was actually a truck in front of us, spraying up a dense curtain of water. Did I mention the freeway was down to one lane for road construction? Well, it was.
Still, we got to Chicago without incident and found our hotel. I had made the reservations over the internet, and not being familiar with Chicago, I picked the hotel pretty much at random (as close to the Field Museum as we could get so we wouldn't have to drive on the freeway to get there, then the cheapest I could find). We were in a little cluster of hotels that service the Midway Airport. A nice little oasis, and our hotel was very well run, clean with very friendly and helpful staff. But to get there we had to drive through what I can only hope is the pit of Chicago. (It actually wasn't until we were leaving on Thursday morning that I actually saw parts of Chicago that were clean and well kept).
The next day was Field Museum Day. Our non-refundable, non-exchangable tickets were only good between 9:30-10 a.m. Mapquest directions said it'd take about 12 minutes to get there from our hotel. We gave ourselves an hour so we could get there early, no stress. It took almost exactly an hour to get there, and it was the very opposite of no stress, as my eldest puked all over himself in the back seat (whether from nerves or a side effect of my husband's techniques for driving stick in stop-and-go traffic, who can say?)
So now it's already 9:30, we don't know where we are or where we can get a pair of pants and be back in less than 30 minutes (because he didn't lean forward to aim for the floor: it was all over his jacket and his pants and his seat. And by the way hotel laundry service for a pair of pants and a jacket is $20, FYI). So we cleaned him up as best we could in the restroom and got in line. Because those tickets were 100 nonrefundable dollars.
Now it could just be my pathological optimism talking, but this actually worked out well for us. It was very crowded throughout the entire exhibit, but when someone in your party still smells a bit like vomit, people generally choose to give you a bit more room. So we got to see everything, and it was very, very cool. Egypt, and specifically Egypt circa the time Akhenaten was in power (Tut's predecessor) was one of the settings for novel #2, so I've done a lot of reading on this time period. Enough to where I actually recognized a lot of the artifacts. Aidan and Oliver were interested as well, which is cool since it wasn't really geared for children. Oliver did, however, get freaked out by a massive stone head, part of a long-lost statue of Akhenaten, which was set up high so it sort of loomed over you in one room. I can't hardly blame him, he was one scary guy (and his daughters are even more alien-looking; the theory is that the whole family had some bizarre inbreeding-related disease). This isn't a picture of that head, but just to give you an idea:
I can definitely see why he was freaked out. But then he was also freaked out by Sue the T. Rex in the lobby. And the stuffed gorillas. And the animatronic bugs in the Underground Adventure...
They were both very good in the clearly not-meant-for-kids Tut exhibit. And the Field Museum had other exhibits on Egypt that were kid-oriented. You could touch stuff and interact with things (like using a shaduf to pour water into an irrigation canal, or trying to pull a massive block of stone using ropes and a wood sledge). It was a nice museum, but we didn't stay long on account of the puke smell one of us was still stewing in. We did get a big Tut T-shirt that covered most of the big spots. And I, of course, bought the museum book with photos of all the artifacts (plus a CD of the audio tour narrated by Omar Sharif, a nice bonus since we hadn't paid for that option with our exhibit tickets). And the book was written by Zahi Hawass. Not "foreword by" not "introduction by", written by. (Completely off topic, but my similar book on the Viking exhibit which spawned the ideas for my WIP has a foreword by Hillary Rodham Clinton. I have no idea why. That book has some terrific contributors, especially in the Greenland section, which of course is the most-referenced part of my book. But who hears "Viking" and thinks "Hillary"? It's just bizarre).
In case some of you are saying, "Who the hell is Zahi Hawass?", I assure you if you've ever watched a doc about Egypt on the Discovery Channel, or the History Channel, or any other channel, I guarantee you've seen Zahi Hawass:
So that covers day one of our vacation. Day two was less eventful. The Shedd Aquarium was amazing (no one puked, but Oliver was freaked out by the giant sperm whales that hung from the ceiling in the food court and the giant octopus on the ceiling of the gift shop). It still rained all day, so we never got to go to the sculpture garden or any parks or even just walk along Lake Michigan. When you're travelling with a high-energy 5-year-old, this is more than a little disappointing. We resorted to letting them watch Pokeman because it was the only kid's show on the hotel TV (formerly a forbidden show, but all their friends watch it). They were both very excited and sat quietly and colored in their notebooks while they watched it (our hotel room was actually one big bed plus a fold-out couch, which was cool because that meant during the long evenings stuck in doors we could sit on a couch and had a coffee table to draw and play on rather than trying to make do with two beds). (We also had a microwave and a little fridge, so we could cook frozen dinners rather than eat out. Did I mention the hotel was great?).
It quit raining on Thursday, the day we drove back. We decided to take the highways through downtown so they could see the Sears Tower (or as Oliver calls it, the Serious Tower, which is taller than the Vampire State Building). They got a lot of looks at it; there was road construction and it took over an hour to get from one freeway to the next. But they were really geeked to see it since it had been in clouds, mist, and fog every other time we'd come downtown. They never did get a good look at Lake Michigan, though. There wasn't enough cash left to park anywhere, so we had to let it go.
The drive back through Wisconsin was beautiful. The leaves were just starting to turn (in a few more weeks they'll be spectacular; memo to self, next trip to Chicago will be in October).
But we had to make one last stop on the way home, at Best Buy. The Star Wars: Lego Game II just came out. If you've spoken to my sons recently, this is a fact you are already very well aware of.
That's why they were so well behaved on vacation and during the long car rides. Bribery.
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