Chi-Town!

This past weekend Derek and I headed up to Chicago to visit some of our best friends. We stayed with Kari and her husband Stephen and my friend Sarah stayed with us too.  Now I seem to be having some bad luck with cameras. I broke our camera on our trip to Marco Island, but luckily Sarah had an extra that she let me have. Well, now it seems I have misplaced that one as well. So I have no photos to document our trip. But Kari let us take some using her camera, so as soon as I get my hands on those I will share :) So here is the text only version of our little trip.

We headed out on Friday morning - after oversleeping because our power went out on Thursday and when I reset my clock Thursday evening I set it to AM. So my alarm was set to the correct time on Friday morning, except my clock thought it was night time therefore it didn't go off :(  (Losing power also caused me to get stuck at my house because my car was in the garage and I couldn't figure out how to get the door open so my boss had to come rescue me - but that's another story for another day.) Our goal was to get to Chicago before crazy rush hour traffic and we got started an hour and a half late. But we made good time and got into town before traffic started getting too crazy.

Kari and Stephen live in Lincoln Park so the first thing we did was take a little walk around town. They have a cute little pond right by their apartment, we went down to the beach and walked along it for a while and then headed back to the apartment by way of the zoo. Unfortunately most of the exhibits were closed by the time we got to the zoo so we didn't get to see lots of animals, but the sun was setting and the views were beautiful. That night we headed downtown to meet Stephen at Giordano's Pizza for dinner. Wow. That pizza is amazing! We spent the rest of the evening hanging out and talking and Kari teaching me how to sew a fun little project for my newest nephew who should be arriving in the next couple of weeks!

Saturday morning we woke up from a wonderful nights sleep. Their guest bed is super comfy! Kari made us a delicious breakfast and I finished my sewing project. We all headed down to Michigan Avenue to get some shopping in. We started at one end and worked our way down and then headed over to State Street to get some Garrett's Popcorn. Ok, this stuff is like crack. It is so good. I wish we had more. I'm salivating just thinking about it. If you ever go to Chicago you must get some. By the time we got our popcorn it was getting pretty cold, so we headed to a little tea shop and got some drinks and ate our popcorn. A few of Kari's friends met up with us and we hung out for a bit.

Next was more shopping. We tried on lots of clothes and even bought a few things. We went to what used to be Marshall Fields (and is now Macy's) and went to Holiday Lane where we purchased our 2010 Ornament. Every year Derek and I try to buy an ornament from one of our trips to put on our Christmas tree. We got  pizza slice ornament and Kari wrote Chicago 2010 on it for us. Then we headed to Joy Yee in Chinatown for dinner. And it was amazing too! We ate so much good food. It is a good thing we did a lot of walking while we were there. That is another cool thing about Chicago. We drove there, but once we parked our car we didn't have to use it until we left. We took busses and trains everywhere and walked and I loved it. (I probably wouldn't have loved it so much if it was 10 or 20 degrees colder.)  After dinner we took the train back to the apartment and hung out some more. It was so great to get to hang out with such good friends who I used to see on the regular and no longer get to.

Sunday morning involved cinnamon rolls and chruch at Moody Church. (Sarah had to head back to Naperville before church so this is where we parted ways with her.) It was so cool to go to church there. For one, it's just a really great church  with a great message, and two, I loved how multi-cultural it is. In Lexington, at least at the churches I've been to, it's 95% + white folks. Here there were people from all over the world. I think it was cool to see what it's really going to look like in heaven one day. We loved it. After church we went to pocket puppies and played with cute little puppies and then to lunch. Sadly, after lunch it was time to go. We had such a great trip though and I can't wait to go back. I loved Chicago (although I'm thinking I'm going to wait til spring to head back) and I loved seeing my friends. I miss them so much, but it was so fun hanging out.