Monday, October 28
My alarm was set for 5:30, but I got up a half-hour earlier. And then, rush, rush, rush to get ready for the service techs to come at 7:00. Which they did, right on time.
Sadly, they missed us--Ed was dumping the tanks when they came by our parking spot. When he got back, he had to go flag down a guy.
Before that we had a near disaster of great proportions. Ed started pulling away from the site with the electric cable still connected. Possibly it would have just pulled the cord out of the socket and dragged it along the ground, but the plug is pretty hefty and might have stayed in place. I saw him moving and ran screaming toward the front so I could flag him down, and--unbelievably--he heard me! And stopped in time. Whew.
Then when the tech was looking over our issues, the jacks wouldn't level us. That's never happened before with this motor home. Weird coincidence. It kept saying the battery was low. But even though it was chilly-ish, having gotten down to 34 degrees the night before, it wasn't cold enough to explain that. So, we don't know.
We were finished by 8:30 and headed to Chicago. Only problem was, when I'd made the plans for the day, I didn't take into account the time change BACK to central time for the day. I'd known that Indiana was in the Eastern time zone, but not that our day in Chicago would be back in Central. So that gave us an extra hour to kill.
There it is
My plan to kill time if we arrived before the Museum of Art opened was to walk through a couple of parks and look at birds. Not a good plan. It was chilly and breezy and all the parks appeared to be closed for the season or simply deserted of bird life. If I'd been alone, I'd have found a coffee shop, acquired a cuppa, and sat in the sun to people watch.
But that sort of thing never seems to appeal to Ed, so we walked through Millenium Park, saw the famous "bean", and then walked down to Lake Michigan and back. We didn't go out Navy Pier, a famous amusement park, because just the walking we did was enough to do a number on Ed's hip and back. He needed the exercise, but not like that--yuuck. No fun walking in pain.
The bean in Millenium Park:
When we got back it was near enough to lunch time (for our stomachs, at least, since they'd already started adjusting to eastern time) that we just went down to the parking garage, sat in the Jeep, and ate lunch. Very neatly polishing off the last of our camping food.
Then the museum. Like wow and then some. I was bowled over often, and I'm not all that easily bowled over. Among other cool things we saw were
Some Monet,
Plus a medieval armor display and a whole lot of other stuff.
We were very tired though. All that walking and standing would make anyone tire, and Ed had started off in pain. And didn't take an Aleve pill. Plus, even though the first couple of hours in the museum were very pleasant, around mid-afternoon tons of people flooded in. It was almost impossible to stand and stare at a the paintings from a decent distance without ten or twenty people wandering around in front of you.
So after our many hours of gaping at art, we headed for the exit. The StayPineapple hotel check-in time wasn't until 4pm, but we arrived at about 3:30 and the desk clerk didn't have an issue with that.
.
The only other thing I'd planned to do was to walk the "Magnificent Mile", a fancy shopping and business district in downtown. But Ed was clearly too tired. He'd have done it if I asked, but I looked at the situation and decided it was just too much. We ordered delivery from Giordano's and watched an old Harry Potter episode.
The food wasn't very good. The guy at the service center said that the whole deep-dish Chicago pizza was just a gimmick and that real Chicagoans ate the Tavern Style. So that's what we ordered. The sauce was good but the crust was like a biscuit crust and not tasty at all. And I couldn't figure how how to use the online menu to do a half-and-half, so I just got Ed 's meat pizza and shared it. No yummy veggies. So sad.
Nighttime views from our hotel windows:
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