We went for a long urban stroll through Chicago today. The only difficulty we encountered was trying to locate the parking garage where we had rented a space for the day. Between tall buildings, dual level streets, one way streets, and lots of traffic, it took close to an extra hour to find our spot. Once that was accomplished, we had a fabulous day. Our entire tour of Chicago is captured in this photo.
Our trek began on the river walk. This is where the Chicago River flows into Lake Michigan.
We had a great day for a walk. Many people were enjoying the river walk and the beautiful aqua water.
The tall buildings, both old and new, are right up to the river walk’s edge.
From the river walk, we went west about two blocks to see Union Station. The building houses an underground train station.
The architecture inside the building is amazing. These are the steps down from the street to the station. The inside has massive columns, detailed ceilings, and carved decorations all around the building.
Train stations should always look this good. You lose a sense of the scale of the building in this picture. The columns at the far end are as tall as the columns in the previous picture. This atrium is about four stories tall.
Everywhere you looked there were more carvings and art work to appreciate.
From Union Station we headed east toward Willis Tower. This building is over 1700 feet tall.
After seeing Willis Tower, we continued east toward Lake Michigan. We saw the elevated trains, the start of route 66, and some more interesting buildings. From the start of Route 66, we headed south to Lou Malnati’s Pizza to sample deep dish pizza. It was worth the wait.
The pizza was REALLY tasty. We were only able to finish half of the 10″ pizza.
After lunch, we continued our walk toward Lake Michigan and the Adler Planetarium. Along the way, we walked across Grant Park, one of several parks we saw during the day.
Adler Planetarium is on the edge of Lake Michigan. The planetarium also has a great museum.
Here is a large telescope displayed in the museum.
The planetarium has a spectacular view of the Chicago skyline.
From the planetarium, we started our walk back to our car. We saw many boats and a couple of very large sailboats as we walked along Lake Michigan. The buildings in the background are about a mile away.
On our walk back to the car, we saw Buckingham Fountain. You can see people in the picture standing on the fountain’s edge. It is really big.
Our final park of the day was Millennium Park. This is a picture of the Millennium Memorial.
The flowers in the gardens are very well maintained. They are also everywhere in the park.
The most unique item in Millennium Park is Cloud Gate. It is a large shiny mirror that looks like a space ship from a sci-fi movie. It is a lot of fun to walk around Cloud Gate to see the reflections of the surrounding buildings.
Our last stop in Chicago was the old Chicago Library Building. It is now the Chicago Cultural Center. The exterior of the building only hints at the magnificent work and detail inside the building.
This is one of the stained glass art work domes inside the Chicago Cultural Center. There were too many areas to view in this building. One room inside was about 10, 000 square feet. The flooring was individual mosaic tiles that were less than a square inch each. That translates to over 1,000,000 tiles in the floor of just that room. It was both gorgeous and unbelievable to think about the work to lay that floor.
Our ride out of Chicago was relatively easy, even with the rush hour traffic. It was a long drive through the evening until almost midnight before we got to our next hotel in southern Indiana. The long day was worth every moment.