After depositing my nephew at his new home for the next four years, my sister and I decided to reward ourselves with a short trip (a day and half) to Chicago.  We took the 745 (or something like that) AM train from Ann Arbor to Chicago.  (for more info about the train ride see earlier post Patience is a Virtue)

i treated us to the train tickets and my sister paid for the hotel.  She decided that we deserved a reward so she booked us at the Radisson Blu Hotel.  The location was excellent, just a short walk to all the important spots in the city, and a hop, skip and a jump away from CVS Drugstore.  Now that’s a great location!  And the room was beautiful!

On our first day, we decided to take a walking tour to see the old mansions, reminiscent of the walk that Sandra Bullock took, with special instructions from Keanu Reeves, in The Lake House.  (I really did search for Lake House walking tour and found the map that we used as reference).  Before we headed off on this tour, we stopped for lunch.  We were on our way to the restaurant we chose online when we spotted Lawry’s Prime Rib.

I asked my sister to take my picture, and we decided that we would just have lunch there.  That was one of our dad’s favorite restaurants and since we felt that he was with us for the trip, saving us from one scrape or another, it would be a nice tribute to him.  So we filled up with prime rib for her and turkey breast for me.  And we were ready…or so we thought.

We had only gone on about 15 minutes when my feet started to hurt.  Alas, I realized that the cute sandals that I chose specifically for this trip was not designed for all that walking.  By the time we finished visiting 15 of the 17 mansions on the map, my feet were blistered.  I couldn’t walk to the hotel anymore so we hailed a cab.

We decided to recharge at the hotel (and make a CVS stop to buy some band-aids for my feet).  We enjoyed our recharging so much that we were too lazy to go out for dinner. Thankfully, the hotel has an excellent Italian restaurant called Filini.  We were still full from our huge lunch so we just had appetizers.  Then decided to walk to Michigan Avenue for some dessert and shoe shopping.  Well it was just supposed to be dessert, but I found some shoes.  And then it was time for some Inday photos!

We went back to our room and planned the next day’s itinerary.  We got up early to have brunch at a small cafe that my sister found online (can’t remember the name right now) but the food was really good! and we were lucky enough to beat the crowd.  We still had time before our river tour so we went back to the hotel.  When we came out for the tour it started raining and as we stood inline waiting to board the boat, the rain kept getting stronger.  We bought ponchos from the tour office and got on board.  (the ponchos weren’t very cute so no photos!)  The rain stopped halfway thru our tour Thank God!  It was a really great experience.  We had a really funny tour guide who told us the history of the buildings.  The architecture in Chicago is truly beautiful and fascinating.  Almost every building’s design had a meaning and a significance.  

After the river tour, we had lunch at Pecking Order, a Filipino-owned restaurant that served reinventions of Pinoy dishes like Adobo.  The food was very good.  My favorite was the Coconut Adobo Rice Arancini which is a fried rice ball filled with garlic rice and Adobo with gata.  We also had the Grilled Chicken which was very juicy and flavorful, even the white meat was tender.  For desert, we had coffee leche flan.  By the time we finished, the weather had gotten quite nice and we needed to walk off all that chicken we ate for lunch so we took a stroll around Millenium Park and visited the Cloud Gate Sculpture, or as I liked to call it, the bean thing-y.

That night, as much as we tried, we were just too tired to check out Chicago’s nightlife, so we did the next best thing, we ordered pizza and had a quiet dinner in our beautiful hotel room.  And slept early so we could be ready for early morning train back to Detroit where we would take the flight back to New York.

It was short, sweet and very tiring.  And i have the memories of those blisters to treasure forever.

That’s all for now….bow.