Trip for the Decade 5

Tuesday morning, Madre, Padre, Elise and I drove out to Rivka and Chace’s to return their vehicle and then Rivka dropped us off at the train station to head into downtown Chicago, an adventure of its own!

We had a hard time finding the unmarked train station, which lead to our cutting it about as close as possible to boarding when we needed to.

Finally, we picked a place that we speculated was the train station, ran out the car with all our gear, ran up the set of stairs (a nice man helped with my two pieces, and I carried my baby and bag. Thank you kind man randomly sitting on the staircase!), walked briskly to the open train door, asked the train official dude if we could board and received the response that we had 30 seconds! And that was no joke! Train started moving 30 seconds later; no waiting for nothin’!

From the train station in downtown, I found a map and we walked about 6 blocks to a random spot in front of a McDonalds where we were to find a shuttle bus that we had never seen and that was not marked some time between 4:30 and 5:15, which would take us to Doug and Emily’s apartment building.

I would like to take some time emphasizing that I found a map and that I could have led us just fine to this random spot (and did). We did not need any kind of GPS thing and we did not need to follow it blindly in order to find the place.

Elise is in the pack in front of me, that’s why I look like that.

Doug and Emily live in downtown Chicago in a studio apartment on the 39th floor of their very swanky building! Every amenity one could think of they’ve got! It’s also the cheapest place you could dream of for a downtown apartment. So fun!

6 of us were in their place the first night and 7 the next (Bekah joined us). For only being five-hundred something square feet it was huge! We fit very nicely. We got to do some Chicago touring and work visiting.

 

We also ate authentic Chicago pizza which I think had 4 lbs of cheese in it!!

View from their apartment! When there isn’t thick fog,it’s a grand view.