Chicago, Illinois: Day One

I'm going to venture away from my standard one location at a time posts and just go a little Virginia Woolf on y'all for my Chicago experience: night one through day one.

We departed Cleveland and began the ride through most of Ohio, Indiana, and then suddenly we were on the Sky Way on the way to Chicago. If there was any doubt that we were going to exclusively use the metro system, it was shot as the final 5 miles of our drive took the better part of an hour.

After settling in and freshening up, we had found a dive bar recommended online close to a metro stop on the convenient line, so we figured it was a match made in heaven. It was cheap and decent, and was very standard Chicago. I say standard Chicago because I imagine replacing Bears signs for Eagles signs and we would have found this bar in Philadelphia. There was kareoke, fried goods and cheap beer so it was a great start to two road-weary people.

We woke up the next morning and we had done some research to find that a Chicago Go-Card is a $70 investment for one day for admission and line hopping for the most famous Chicago tourism stops. We took the El from O'Hare to Palmer House to purchase out Go Cards (you can buy them online as well as at a lot of other places). Guidance was unclear (and my brain was unclear from a beer or three too many) but after a trenta from Starbucks I was good to go, purchased the Go Card and went on our merry way to the Willis Tower.

Much to our surprise, we got to skip the line to go to the top of the Willis Tower. Willis is better known as the Sears Tower if some of you are confused. There was a small display leading up to the elevators to the top, probably mostly designed as time wasters when the lines are longer. There were screens on the ground you can stand on, such as the pitching mound at Wrigley, and in 60 seconds (the time of the elevator ride) you would go the 103 floors up.

A stuffed and shakey elevator ride let us out at the top of the Willis Tower. The view was spectacular, and you could see amazingly far in every direction. The rolling fog of Lake Michigan make this a precarious spot. If we would have gone the second day our views would have been horrible. No visit to the top of Willis Tower is complete without a stop at the Sky Walk, newly installed in 2009 where you can stand four feet outside of the building over Chicago traffic. Its crazy. That is all.

While on line to get the elevator down, we discussed our plans for the remainder of the day to take advantage of the Go Card for all it was worth. We decided to do the Architectural Tour by Cruise, Lunch at Navy Pier, and the Field Museum before heading to Wrigley for game one of two of that week.

We arrived at Navy Pier, got our timed tickets for the cruise, and ate lunch at Harry Caray's. Lunch was reasonably priced, delicious and a trip inside to go to the bathroom revealed a small sized sports history of Chicago museum.

The architectural cruise was a can't miss. So many details can go unnoticed and it tells such a deeper history of the city by going on this tour.

After the cruise we attempted to go to the Field Museum. We walked in with a few minutes to go before last admittance but were turned away. It baffled both of us because in theory we were pre-paid, so we didn't need to do anything to get in (since the only stipulation on the Go Card is one admission per site per day). We angrily walked out and went to the Shedd Aquarium to kill time. I'm sure with the right mindset the Shedd is worth it, but we've been to the Baltimore Aquarium several times so this was just what we could (and have) seen at home.

The moral of the story is if you are able to hustle around to the hottest spots in one day, the Go-Card is worth it. Individually, each of the places we went would have cost us $103 and time in line that we didn't have to deal with. If we had started earlier it would have been even more worth it. However, I don't think the two day pass is worth it. At $129, I suppose there's more you could do, or do a similar amount as we did slower.