What a BLAST!

Wow.  We had so much fun this weekend.  Il’l try to condense it all…

We headed out early on Saturday morning to try to make it to the "train station" (you’ll see in a bit why I put that in quotes) by 9:25am Indiana time.  The ride was uneventful, full of chit chat and good conversation, and after taking an alternate route to get to the "train station" we were alarmed to find this….
at the address we were given for the "train station".  There was a set of tracks in the middle of the road, with a trolley line above it.  What??? Were we riding a TROLLEY to Chicago?  Or a bus?  The town was a little sketchy… kind of dumpy to put it nicely.  So you can imagine what thoughts were running through our head as to what we’d be riding in for the next hour and a half. We were a little dissappointed, as we’d had our hopes up to have our first "real" train ride. 

To our relief, a real, live train pulled up to our "bus stop" LOL.  The ride to Chicago was pretty unventful, other than the 15 minute delay we had when a car was stalled on the train tracks and we had to wait for a tow truck to move it (does that REALLY happen in real life???). 

We arrived in Chicago, picked up lots of visitor info at the Cultural Center and decided to head somwhere to eat and leaf through our literature.  Where else to chow down at in the big city than McDonalds?  Yeah…. you heard me.  We went to Chicago and ate McDonalds.  Hey, it sounded good, ok??

After that we started our trek down the Magnificent Mile to all the shops.  The streets weren’t too busy, and the weather was perfect.  Ok, it could have been warmer, but it was nowhere near unbearable.  We shopped for, well, many many hours.  One of the coolest stores was CHIARoScURO, it had so many unique gifts, and lots of awesome StoryPeople art.  I got an adorable outfit for Porter at H&M (I’m using it for pictures, so I’ll post those later), and I spent the most money at GAP (go figure, like I couldn’t shop at Gap at home??)  Gap in Chicago was so fun… I’d love to work there. They had live music, and all the employees were friendly and dancing and singing.  It was like a dance party!  LOL.  In the kids section, a woman literally shopped till she dropped (ok, mean joke told by an employee on the elevator… we didn’t know what was wrong with her or why she fell, but paramedics were called). 

 

After hours of shopping, the streets started to fill up getting ready for the Magnificent Mile Lights Festival and Parade .  We weren’t too interested in seeing that, and figured that would be a good time to get some dinner.  We attempted to eat at the Cheesecake Factory, but decided it wasn’t worth the 65-80 minute wait.  We were seated at Elephant & Castle, but I wasn’t thrilled with some "unique" items on their menu (I’m a plain boring eater), so we settled on Gino’s East for some Chicago deep dish pizza.  It was yummy, and we had some amusing customers sitting at the table next to us who pretty much narrarated our dinner "Oh look at their big pizza, good thing we got the Medium not the Large."  "Oh look, they’re writing on the seat"  "Now they’re going to take a picture of what they wrote").  They might as well have joined us for dinner. 

 

After dinner, the streets had cleared up some, but we decided we had seen everything we needed to see and headed back to the train station to catch the 8:00 train. 

The ride back was very… uhm…. amusing.  Next to me was a family mom, dad, their kids Jenna and Jacob, dad’s sister and her son Thomas.  WOW.  What….. brats.  At first I empathized with them. I remembered travelling with Porter and how stressful it was and how unpredictable kids were.  As the trip started, I realized these weren’t any normal overtired kids.  These were spoiled kids who walked all over their parents.  They were around 4/5 years old, and they were ALL over the place.  Climbing over the seats, walking in the aisle, crawling on the floor, swapping seats, pulling eachothers hair, screaming and just plain not listening and acting BAD. In the beginning the parents would tell them to sit down, and stay seated, and 2 minutes later the kids would be up and swapping seats and the parents would allow it.  They were standing in the seats, trying to climb over it.  The conductor yelled at them, and from that point on the parents kept "threatening" them… "The conductor said to sit down"  "Oh look, the conductor is getting mad at us"  "Remember what the conductor said?"  "The conductor wants to to stay in your seat."  What the hell is wrong with "I SAID TO SIT DOWN AND STAY IN YOUR SEAT??"  Why did it have to be "the conductor?"  UGH.  Towards the end of the trip the dad finally cracked the kids each a spanking (each for a different bad behavior) but man, I’d have cracked their asses long before that.  You could tell those kids were never taught to sit and behave.  Wow.  So finally after 40 minutes of dizzying acrobatics from the circus, they exited the train.  Heather and I spent a good half hour just astounded at how bad they were.  And behind us there were about 8 other kids, ranging from 2 years to about 6 years, who barely made a peep, and when they stood up or did something wrong, you had better bet their parents were right on them and made them sit back down. 

Anyway, that was probably the most amusing part of the trip.  Note to self…. make sure good car/bus/train/restaurant behavior is being instilled in Porter!!!

We arrived in Michigan City, to our "train station" and started on our way to our motel.  I was so nervous.  $40 for a motel was so cheap, and we were expecting the worst.  We arrived and it didn’t look bad, just old and outdated.  I checked us in and it was one of those "mom and pop" joints.  The owners were from India or something and were very nice.  They put us in room 115, and said "This is very nice room. Yes, very nice room."  And it was.  It was outdated, but it was very clean and the bathroom was new.  It was roomy and had a tv, mini fridge and microwave, as well as two decent sized windows.  We were impressed!  We watched a bit of tv and drifted off to sleep.

And woke up at…. 6:30 am!   Can you believe that?  We had a chance to FINALLY sleep in and we woke up at 6:30 am!!  (mind you, that was Illiniois time, so 7:30 our time in Michigan).  We couldn’t get back to sleep so we lounged around for a bit, got dressed and went to Burger King for a breakfast sandwich.  We spent our day shopping at the outlet mall in Michigan City and then headed home around 4pm.  We wanted Subway (can you believe that 3 of our 4 meals were at fast food places???), so we drove (mind you we were famished, weak and shaking from hunger) until we found a Subway in Sawyer, MI.  And let me tell you, this was THE slowest service I’ve ever had.  It took her at least 5 minutes to make my sandwich.  And all I had was a 6 inch turkey, lettuce, mustard and black olives.  Rediculous.

So, all in all our trip was a success.  We alread have ideas for more Girls Weekends as well as a Family Weekend to Chicago.  We’ll definitely go back to the $40 Travel Inn… its not the grandest place, but its a bed to sleep. 

I hope I didn’t ramble too much, but there is just so much to write about!  I now need to get some laundry done and get to bed… work tomorrow…..