a day, a night, and a day in chicago

(This was originally written on Sunday night, but I didn't want to post it until I had pics ready to go.)

Greetings from Chicago Midway Airport. Since it’s Becca’s birthday tomorrow, I decided to try to do something creative to celebrate this year, so I bought us plane tickets to Chicago. We left home early Saturday morning and arrived in Chicago around 10:30am. Our first stop was our hotel, the W. on Lakeshore Drive. I’d never stayed in a W. before, but thought I’d give it a whirl since I was given a gold level Starwood Preferred Guest membership when I hit elite status with Northwest airlines last year. Anyway, I decided to get an above-average room since it was a special occasion, but I’m pretty sure they upgraded me without saying anything. When we walked into the room, we found that it was a suite. It had 1.5 baths, two TVs, and a living room separate from the bedroom. It was a very spacious room, which was nice. It’s great to have the perks for all the work travel I’ve done in the last year.

Every W. hotel has a program with Acura where you can schedule a ride to any location within five miles of the hotel, and a driver in an Acura MDX will take you there for free. We decided to try this out in order to save some money, so we scheduled a ride after we put our luggage in the room. A 2010 MDX (very nice SUV, by the way) took us to our first destination, Gino’s East, for lunch. We’ve tried a couple different pizza places in Chicago, and Gino’s remains my favorite. We shared pizza bread and a small patty sausage pizza, and the food was great, as usual.






After lunch, we decided to walk up and down Michigan Avenue, aka the Magnificent Mile, to do some shopping. We didn’t go into too many stores, but did stop in a Zara (Becca had never heard of it so I suggested we check it out, since they have a very interesting retail model), the Giorgio Armani boutique (shockingly expensive—I had no idea), Cole-Haan (there was a group of college student-looking kids protesting the usage of animal fur at the shop next to Cole-Haan, which was both fascinating and frustrating—they were pretty hardcore), Burberry, Coach, etc. We each got a pair of shoes while we were out, but didn’t get anything else. After a few hours of walking, I decided I needed a break since I had been up since 3:45am, so we headed back to the hotel and took a one-hour nap.

John Hancock Tower:


Michigan Avenue was busy despite temps in the 20's:


For dinner, I had made reservations for us at a place called Café Ba-Ba-Reeba, which I’d read about online. Becca had been wanting to try tapas for a while, and since I’d never tried it either, I decided I’d take her to a popular place. It’s a good thing that I made reservations since the place was super busy and I heard the hostess telling people that the wait would be 1.5-2 hours. We didn’t have to wait at all, which was nice. Anyway, if you’re not familiar with tapas, it’s a form of Spanish (as in, from Spain) cuisine. You order several small dishes to share with whomever is at your table. Anyway, here’s what we ordered:

Goat cheese croquettes
Some stuffed red pepper thingy
Spicy meatballs with tomato sauce and potatoes
Goat cheese with tomato sauce and toasted bread
Bacon-wrapped dates
Braised lamb with spinach and couscous
Shrimp with garlic and red pepper flakes
Egg and potato omelette

I think that’s everything. Everything that we tried was really good, and we both agreed that this was a fun way to try different foods and that we’d like to do tapas again. I had mentioned in the dinner reservation that it was Becca’s birthday, so they also gave us a couple of small desserts for free.

We didn’t originally have plans this morning, but I woke up early and decided that we should go to the Sears Tower (now called the Willis Tower), since Becca had never been there before. We got there early so that we wouldn’t have to wait in line, but discovered when we got there that they had seasonal hours not mentioned on their website and would thus open an hour later than we expected, so we had to wait in a nearby McDonald’s for a while. When the Sears Tower finally did open, we were able to get in and up to the skydeck quickly, which was nice.

Sunrise from our hotel window:




Sears Tower:






After we finished up at the Sears Tower, we took a cab over to Joe’s Stone Crab for lunch. We had seen Joe’s Stone Crab (the original Miami location) mentioned on a Travel Channel TV show, and the Chicago location had come highly recommended to Becca by a friend, so I got us reservations for an early lunch. Once again, we were too early and the placed hadn’t opened yet, so we walked one block over to Michigan and walked around a mall for a while. Most of the stores hadn’t yet opened, so it wasn’t very exciting.

Lunch turned out to be great. Joe’s is famous for stone crab and other seafoods. The stone crab is a sustainable food source, which is interesting. When fishermen catch a stone crab, they cut one claw off and then return the crab to the ocean. The claw grows back after about a year. Anyway, we had heard that stone crabs tasted different than other crabs and that they were very good, so we decided to share two lunch combos, as well as a bowl of Manhattan clam chowder, sautéed Brussels sprouts with bacon, and macaroni and cheese. The combos were:

Five stone crab claws
Filet mignon
Mashed potatoes
Hash browns
Cole slaw
Key lime pie
Banana cream pie

Becca’s the big seafood fan, so I focused on the filet mignon and just had one crab claw, while she ate the other four and just a couple bites of the filet. Everything we got was really good except for the cole slaw, which I thought was nasty since there was relish in it, which I find vile in all forms. I’m not a big crab guy, but I thought it was surprisingly good. You have to be very careful when eating stone crab because the shells are much thicker than the average crab shell, and if you were to bite into one you’d probably crack your teeth. Anyway, they cook, chill, then break the claws before they bring them out. You pick away the broken shell and then eat the meat until you get to the section just before the claw, which is where most of the meat is. You pull away the shell from that, hold the claw in your hands, dip it in this rockin’ mustard sauce they give you, then bite down on the meat until you get to a stringy, tendon-like part, then pull the meat away. Again, surprisingly good. If you’re a seafood fan and are ever around one, I highly recommend Joe’s.

After lunch, we went back to the mall that had been closed and visited a few shops. We saw some interesting stuff but didn’t buy anything. We then headed back to the hotel to check out and put some stuff down. After we did that, we used the two tickets for free bar drinks they had given us at check-in to get some Shirley Temples, then got another Acura MDX ride to the Art Institute of Chicago. For my money, AIC is the best art museum not on the East Coast, so I was glad to go again. Among my favorites were works by Van Gogh, Monet, Magritte and Dali. Tickets happened to be free all February long, which was an added bonus. If you haven’t been to the AIC, I highly recommend it. You won’t be disappointed.













































Our previous MDX driver had given us a gross overestimate of how long it would take to get from the hotel to Midway, so we went back to the hotel fairly early to collect our stuff and catch a cab to the airport. We ended up getting to the airport about 2.5 hours before our flight, and here we are now. It would have been nice to spend another couple of days here, but we both have to get to work. Still, our time here was great. We both really like Chicago and always enjoy coming here.