Three Football Boys and a Girl: The Windy City

Stephanie and I are in Chicago!!!! We got up this morning at 4am and left for the Atlanta airport at 5am. Our flight was scheduled to leave at 7am although I think it was a little later than that since at one point the pilot got on the loudspeaker and told us that his co-pilot called in sick and they were waiting on his back up to arrive. It almost seemed like a joke at first but he was serious and eventually the co pilot arrived. Our flight was very turbulent - although nothing too bad but we had to remain buckled most of the time. The air time of the flight was only like a little over an hour - it was very short. We arrived at O'Hare and our bags were waiting on us when we got to Baggage Claim - and of course mine was VERY visible since it is NEON yellow! We grabbed our bags and headed down to the subway. The subway ride was EXTREMELY LONG. I think we may have been on the blue line for like 45 minutes. Once we transferred to the red line, we only had to sit through two stops. I enjoyed watching the scenery between the airport and downtown and one major thing I noticed was the large amount of grafiti and any body of water that was around was frozen solid. At this point we had not yet even been outside so we were just anticipating the cold weather (the pilot said the Chicago temp was a MILD 20 degrees)....HA!

So, we make it to downtown Chicago - FINALLY! We find our hotel easily and head up to the 5th floor for check-in. We got here about 9am and we were actually able to get into our room which was a HUGE relief b/c we didn't think we would get to and we were planning to just check our luggage until later in the day when our room was ready.

We headed up to our room and it is just AMAZING. The Conrad is a new hotel so everything is very nice and the design is upscale. And let me tell you - the size of the flat screen tv is larger than my sofa at home. I seriously wish I had a tape measure to see how large it is. It also has Bose surround sound and two remote controls that make it very confusing to change channels or turn the volume up and down on the tv! The bathroom is immaculate - the counter top is granite - the shower is a walk in shower (HUGE, by the way), it has a separate bathroom which has it's own phone, bath robes, slippers - there's probably more but I am exhausted since I've been up since 4am and am too lazy to get back up right now to see the rest.

So after we checked out our digs, we put on our cuddle duds under our clothes and headed out to Water Place Tower (a shopping mall) to have lunch. We ate at a place called Food Life which was essentially a mall food court but it was upscale. I had a cheeseburger and fries (yeah, I went all out) but it was DELICIOUS!!!! I was also starving and would have eaten almost anything. After lunch we went shopping on the Magnificent Mile. We went into all kinds of stores - Burberry, Coach, Tiffany, American Girl, Hershey, H&M, Niketown, Nordstrom.............oh there were more but I don't even remember. Oh yeah - we went in to the Lego store - way cool. Stephanie and I took pictures with a an old lego lady - see below.

The trip to the Hershey store was probably the best store of the day - they had the dresses that were made during Project Runway this season when they used the materials from the Hershey store in New York. You can see the pictures below. While I'm sure these are duplicates - it was still very cool to see them in person. And then they do this thing where a lady starts singing a song and someone wins a decorated cupcake (sounds cheesy but when you're in the Hershey store it seems cool). She let us pick a number between 1 and 20 and Steph and I lost but we got Hershey candy bars as a prize anyway. It was funny.

We followed our shopping trip up with a trip to Starbucks for some hot chocolate and now we are in the hotel resting before heading out to the Weber Grill for dinner and then to see the broadway play, Wicked.

Here are a few pictures from today. I missed a lot of things and will get them tomorrow in addition to the sites we will visit in the next two days.