The Windy City. Chi-City.
Heart of America. My Kind of Town. These are just a few of the many nicknames
for Chicago. Call it what you will (and over 2.7 million people call it “home”),
there is none other like it.
Three hundred miles north of
Cincinnati, this was our next stop as we continued our Midwestern tour of the
country this summer. It seems the only news you hear about Chicago is the bad
news. As the third largest city in the nation, murders are up 72% so far in
2016, and shootings surged more than 88% in the first three months of the year.
While this disturbing trend is driven by gangs and mostly contained to a handful
of pockets in the city’s South and West sides, these kinds of statistics are
still troubling for tourists coming into the area. We chose to stay in an RV
Park in Joliet, about 50-miles northwest of Chicago proper, and take the train
into town for our visits. During visits to Boston, Washington D.C., and New York
City, we have found the public transportation systems to be the best way to
tour big cities, and this proved to be the case in Chicago as well.
Despite the dismal media
depiction of this area, we found Chicago a wonderful, vibrant, and beautiful
city, with some of the friendliest people we’ve ever met! Built on 28-miles of
Lake Michigan shoreline, the city is famous for its bold architecture, a
skyscraper skyline that can’t be beat (with some of the tallest buildings in
the country), renowned museums, a hub for culture and the performing arts, and
is a HUGE tourist mecca. In 2015 Chicago received over 52 million international
and domestic visitors, a new record for the city, making it one of the top
visited cities in the nation. If you want it, you’ll likely find it in this lively,
energetic city in the American Heartland.
Our goal during our 10-day
stay was to catch games with both major league baseball teams (the Cubs at Wrigley
Field and the White Sox at U.S. Cellular); take one or more tours; get to a
museum; and just use our own two feet to walk around the diverse and
fascinating areas of the downtown. All this, we accomplished! In this post I am
including pictures from our on-foot explorations; a hop-on-hop-off bus tour;
our trip to the observation deck at the top of the Chicago 360 building (4th
tallest building in Chicago, and 8th in the US); and a visit The
Museum of Science and Industry.
(I will have separate posts
for the two baseball games, and our Architectural Tour by boat on the Chicago
River.)
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