By Shelby
This has been an interesting week. We started in a suburb of the third largest city in the US, Chicago, passed through rural Indiana, and ended up near another large city, Louisville, Kentucky. We also crossed from central time to eastern time. This week started in Naperville, a very nice suburb of Chicago. We worked from the Naperville Public Library both Monday and Tuesday, which was very nice and modern. It was also very busy. We were surprised that there were so many people there on a weekday.
Monday after work, we went to a conveyor belt sushi restaurant. The conveyor belt moves around the restaurant carrying small plates of different sushi dishes. When you see something you want, you take the plate from the belt. You can tell the price of each plate by its color. The price can vary from about a dollar all the way up to $6.50. I thought it was very good. Spencer said he liked it too.
Tuesday after work, we went grocery shopping. We went to an Amazon Fresh store, which was an interesting experience. We got a special cart that scans the item as you put it in the cart. You scan a barcode from your Amazon account and when you go to leave, your account is automatically charged. All your items are already scanned, so you don’t need to go through a checkout. It was pretty neat, but I don’t think it saved us any time, compared to using a self-checkout. There were even Amazon Alexas around the store that can help you find things.
After getting groceries, we went to a park to make dinner. Our dinner was going to be a chicken and vegetable stir fry with rice. Unfortunately, halfway through making dinner, we ran out of propane. I drove to a nearby Walmart to get another tank. We then finished making dinner and got everything cleaned up just as it was getting pretty dark out.
The next day, we worked from Fountaindale Public Library to change things up. This library was also massive, but a lot less busy than Naperville Public Library. After work, we returned to the Planet Fitness we were staying at and watched a movie.
Thursday, we stopped to get breakfast at a local cafe located at a small airport so we could watch planes take off. That was pretty neat. After breakfast, we drove to Naperville Station where we would catch a train to downtown Chicago. The train was a double-decker, so of course, we had to sit upstairs which was cool. The train ride took about an hour to get to Western Ave station, which seemed to be in a pretty sketchy area. As we walked to the stairs to leave the platform, a guy threw rocks in our direction. Fortunately, none of them hit us.
From the train station, we walked a short distance down the road to a metro station. We bought day passes that would allow us as many rides on the metro that day as we wanted. They were only $5 each, so that was a pretty good deal. We took the metro, also famously known as the “El”, short for elevated, into the heart of downtown Chicago.
Our first stop was Millennium Park to see Chicago’s most famous icon “Cloud Gate”, more commonly known as the “Bean”. It was more interesting than I had originally thought. The reflections all around and underneath the bean were very cool to check out. Millennium Park also had a nice few of the Chicago skyline.
Our next stop was Buckingham Fountain, in a different park down the road from Millennium Park. The fountain was very big and had a geyser shooting up from the top. From there, we walked down to the lake and walked along the sidewalk. There were tons of boats docked along the shore. The water surprisingly didn’t look very dirty, considering it was next to a massive city.
We walked along the lake until we met up with the Chicago River. Chicago has a very nice Riverwalk, which follows along the river and has lots of restaurants and places to sit. We walked the whole thing, which ended up being about 1.25 miles. Along the way, we stopped for lemon gelato and a root beer float. At the end of the walkway, there were a bunch of Adirondack chairs to relax in, so we sat for a bit and watched the boats and planes go by. Our original plan was to check out the free Chicago Zoo, but relaxing by the river sounded better after all the walking we had done.
When we started to get hungry for dinner, we started heading to Uno, a pizzeria that claimed to have the original deep-dish pizza. We got the classic kind, with pepperoni, sausage, onions, peppers, and mushrooms. It was very good. We had to eat it with a fork and knife because it was too thick to pick up.
After dinner, we went back to the metro. We took the metro back to the same sketchy train station at Western Ave. The next train from that station to Naperville would be there in about 20 minutes. However, there was absolutely no information anywhere at the station that indicated which platform we needed to be at. If we chose the wrong one (there were two), we’d have to wait another hour for the next train to come through. Spencer called the rail company to ask which platform we should be at and they didn’t even know. They just said it might be the platform on the north side. Luckily, we chose the correct platform and made it onto the train. The train emptied out at each station we stopped at until we were the only ones left in our car until we returned to Naperville. From Naperville, we drove about an hour to a Planet Fitness in Lansing, Illinois. Lansing is very close to the border of Indiana. Overall, we didn’t get the best impression of Chicago. The suburbs seemed nice, along with downtown, but the rest of it didn’t seem very nice. There was also a ton of construction, which is exactly how I remember it when I drove through it a couple years ago.
Friday morning, we ate a quick breakfast and then drove on into Indiana to Indiana Dunes National Park. Our first stop was a 3.5 mile hike to the beach. The second half of the hike was pretty difficult since we had to trudge through sand. On our way back, we saw a bunch of small striped lizards and a baby snapping turtle.
After our hike, we drove to West Beach where we ate lunch and then did another 1 mile hike up a massive dune. From the top, we could see the Chicago skyline in the distance across the lake. West Beach was very nice and surprisingly busy for it being a weekday.
From West Beach, we drove to Dunbar Beach, a less popular but still very nice beach. We stayed there for a few hours. Spencer skipped a lot of rocks and we made a sandcastle. Our mini Stonehenge was a big hit with people walking by.
After a while, we started to get hungry, so we returned to the car and had leftovers for dinner and watched a movie. When the sun started to set, we went back to the beach. We walked over to a few houses that were built for the 1933 Chicago World Fair to show how houses may look in the future. They had new technologies such as central air conditioning and dishwashers. They did look pretty modern for being built so long ago.
We stayed at the beach until the sunset. It was a really good sunset, especially with the Chicago skyline. When it got dark out, we went back to the car and drove over to the visitors center ten minutes away. They allow overnight parking there, so we decided to stay the night.
Saturday morning, we drove on to a Planet Fitness half an hour away to shower and get ready for the day. It was going to be another long day of driving. Our first stop was Fair Oaks Farm, a massive farm people can visit. We took a tractor ride out to the apple orchard and picked a few honey crisp apples. The farm also had a really pretty field of flowers.
Near the apple orchard, there were a bunch of lawn games for people to play. We climbed up Haybale Hill, played tetherball, giant tic tac toe, and cornhole. There was even a “pig in a blanket” game where you can walk into a large plastic pipe and race another.
After we got our apples, our next stop was a restaurant in a small town called Zaharakos. Zaharakos was a diner and ice cream parlor established in 1903. It was pretty cool. They had antique working soda fountains and self-playing orchestra machines. We got some food and then a large banana split. After lunch, which was later than planned, since we unexpectedly crossed into the Eastern Time Zone, we continued on our journey.
Our final stop for the stay was a drive-in movie across the border in Kentucky. Apparently it was National Cinema Day, so the tickets were super cheap. We saw a double feature with the new Top Gun movie and the original Mission Impossible. It started raining and storming not too long after Top Gun started. A surprising number of people left. By the end of the second movie around 1AM, there were only a few cars left.
Our plans for Sunday include the usual, laundry, working on the website, and grocery shopping. We also want to watch Transformers 3, which features a battle in Chicago. The weather for this coming week doesn’t look that great, with thunderstorms almost every day. It also seems very humid here. We’re planning on staying in Jeffersonville, a city near the border to Kentucky for at least a few days next week before moving into Kentucky.
Fun Facts from Week 19:
- The many bridges that cross the Chicago River are lifted a few times a year to allow boats to pass through from storage over the winter into the harbor.
- Indiana Dunes National Park is one of the newer national parks in the US. It became Indiana Dunes National Lakeshore in 1966 and only became a national park in 2019.
2 responses to “Week 19”
I’ve come to realize that both of you really like ice cream!
We do!