Chicago, IL - March 12, 2008

[ this entry is a work in progress.. ]

I have been thinking about making a daytrip to Chicago for over a year now. On Tuesday, I decided that this week would be a good time to give it a try. The weather was forecast to be a lot colder than I would like, but sunny with no snow. I gathered together the materials I would need and on Wednesday began my trek. After work, I walked downtown to the Amtrak station and picked up a round-trip ticket. I had some time to kill before the train left at 10:40pm, so I walked back to Huey's for a philly cheese steak sandwich and gave the bums a few last chances to hit me up for cash before I left town.

The train trip north wasn't too bad. It would have been better if I had been able to sleep more, though. We arrived at Union Station at 9:20am on Thursday. The short walk to the terminal was bone-chilling, so I went to a gift shop inside the station and bought a sweatshirt.

By 9:30am, I was outdoors and headed south to Hot Time In The Old Town Tonight by Team Purdy (GCHR9P). That was a virtual cache near the Chicago Fire Academy. I avoided a few nearby caches that I had hunted on my last trip, preferring to save them for later. Once I got to Roosevelt Street, I headed east picking up three caches before making my way towards Adler Planetarium.

I stopped at this spot to hunt a cache and failed to find it. One interesting thing about the day is that at each place that I struck out, there was at least an interesting sight to see. This picture was taken near the southwest corner of Grant Park.

The area around the Field Museum of Natural History was under a lot of construction, so I had to detour around fairly large areas. I found Mercury by The League of Extraordinary Geocachers (GC19Y62) near the museum. Ducking more construction, I made my way west towards Adler Planetarium.

Close to the planetarium, I found View on DT. by vbratxv (GC1GWZ3), but by this time my hands were so cold that I couldn't open the container - much less sign the log. I ended up going inside the planetarium to warm up. I used a hot air blower in the men's room to thaw out my hands, then had lunch at Galileo's - a small cafeteria in the planetarium. This was a neat place that I hope to visit again sometime. Back outside, I took a picture of the skyline and headed back to View on DT. You can't see it really well in this picture, but there was a lot of ice along the shoreline.

Going around the construction, I headed north to Grant Park and managed to find two more caches at the north end.

I headed northeast along (and under) Lakeshore Drive and made my way to Navy Pier. I was hit amd miss on caches in this area. Many of their names started with Chicago, and I had trouble differentiating between them. I had the necessary data with me, but a warmer day would have helped me out - I had to keep taking off and putting on my gloves.

I found a cache near this statue - located south of the Chicago Tribune building. This was the day's WTF moment. Note the girl at the bottom right of the stature, I used her as a way to show the scale of the statue.


I found a cache near the beginning of Route 66: One End of Route 66 by Panther in the Den (GCTG87).


I was running out of time, and had a choice to head west or back south into downtown. I chose unwisely. I went after three caches - on the first, my GPSr couldn't get me within 300 feet. The second cache was in the middle of a construction area, and the third was buried in a crowd of muggles. This harshed my mellow a bit.

After failing at my last three caches, I was ready to head back to the train station. I was running out of time to do much more caching and had been walking in the subfreezing cold for around 9 hours. I was a little disoriented as well, by this point and had some trouble figuring out where I was relative to the train station. Fortunately, I stumbled upon the Sears Tower! The station was only a few blocks west of the tower. I wanted to go up to the skydeck, but I was wishy-washy about it. I went to the entrance and walked inside to warm up. Once inside, a greeter talked me into going up. Passing through security was fun with all of my electronic gadgets to put in a basket before I passed through a metal detector. The guard, after finding out I was from Memphis, asked me about Elvis and Graceland.

I had to sit through a short film about the tower before I could go up. The elevator ride took about a minute. I should mention that the Sears Tower has two observation levels. The one on the 103rd floor was closed for maintenance, so I got to look out from the one on the 99th floor.


I spent some time taking pictures, and looking out at some of the places I had been. There was a gift shop on this floor and I bought a small model of the Tower as a souvenir. Much of the other stuff they sold was Obama-related. When I was leaving, I noticed other gift shops as well. They must make a killing on trinkets.

Once outside, I walked the few blocks west to Union Station, had dinner at the food court and waited around for my train home. The ride to Memphis was nice - no seatmate. I didn't sleep any better however.

I arrived in Memphis at 6:30am and wanted to go home and shower before going to work. The Madison trolley was shut down, though, so I ended up going straight to work.

I enjoyed my time in Chicago and hope to revisit this city again. I enjoyed the riverwalks, parks, and museums. I took a lot of pictures even though that meant off with the gloves again!