Lions, Tigers, and Bears! Oh, my!

We didn't actually see any tigers, but we did see some apes and a rhino today!

I'll start with yesterday though, I left on the train around 730am yesterday morning from Union Station in Kansas City bound for Union Station in Chicago. I don't know what the deal with the name Union Station is b/c I'm pretty sure that's the same name in New York and D.C. The train ride was pleasant once again, a bit more to look at once we got past all of the corn fields. Somewhere in Illinois a fella by the name of Max got on the train and by that time it was close to packed unlike the ride to New Orleans. Max turned out to be in a band called Save us Hollywood and from what I understand is their manager. He seemed about my age and so traveling around in a van for a couple weeks at a time probably didn't phase him much, but he was a pretty interesting guy and actually fairly grounded from what I took from him.

I then rolled in to Union Station and the view coming into the city was quite a site. Before I could even spot Chip I encountered a camera flash and once I came to I identified the paparazzi and we got on our way. We checked into our "posh" (I'm not really sure what that means but it sounds good) hotel in downtown Chicago between Michigan Avenue and the Navy Pier and then began to walk town as you can see in Chip's note below.

We then grabbed dinner at Lou Malnati's, the guy I saw do one of the Throw downs with Bobby Flay and beat him at deep dish, and put our name on the list. It had a good atmosphere and was busin' people in and out on a frequent basis. We ended up getting the Sausage Deep Dish and overall it was pretty good, but not exactly a wow. The crust was nice and flaky like a good pie crust should be and the sauce was a fairly simple Italian "gravy" and I felt wouldn't be very tough to replicate. The sausage was very nice though well balanced and not too spicy, but not bland either.

This morning we went to mass at Holy Name Cathedral, which just opened back up last week after a pretty horrendous fire. The woodwork in the roof of the Cathedral was pretty amazing and the priest that said the mass was rock solid and gave a good homily. We then had "brunch" down at Portillo's and each had the standard Chicago style hot dog which consists of the following ingredients in this order:

Steamed poppy seed hot dog bun
All beef hot dog (steamed) (preferably Vienna Beef)
Yellow mustard
Chopped white onion (raw)
Neon green relish
Sport peppers
Tomato wedges
Crisp kosher dill pickle spear
Dash of celery salt

I personally went cancer free style on my hot dog (no onions), I don't understand why people put themselves through such non sense. I had eaten at this place in Herdon, VA a few weeks back called the Wiener Circle, which I found out is actually a chain over here even though I wouldn't have thought so since they're run out of a store front for a catering business, so I had some of a sense of what I was expecting to see once I got my dog and toppings. I ended up slightly disappointed from the looks of things it wasn't quite the size of the monster that I got at the Wiener circle, it was surprising however how good it tasted with that combo of ingredients.

We then took a quick cab ride up to Lincoln Park Zoo and got to see probably the best free zoo the US has to offer. The layout was great and the selection and mix of animals was quite impressive. I was kinda bummed we didn't get to see the polar bears since they weren't out today with how hot it apparently was, it wasn't Texas hot I'll tell you that, but it was warm. We then walked back down along the Lake Michigan shore which turns into a beach front during the summer with beach volleyball and palm trees that were probably only there during the summer months. We made our way back down the Navy Pier and got tickets for and architectural boat tour of the city, which was very interesting. The guide went through the different eras of skyscraper design with the different influences of modern, post-modern, art deco, Greek temples, flying buttresses, and so on. Chip probably got a whole lot more out of the tour then myself with all the names the guide was dropping, but I got a lot out of it and really enjoyed myself.