The Road to Chicago

We heard the siren call of Chicago this summer and decided to follow it, plowing up through the great American Midwest on a driving trip that we hadn’t done before. We left Amarillo late Friday afternoon and, four hours later, stopped in Oklahoma City for the first night. After a few minutes of frantic jumping up and down on the beds, everyone made their way downstairs to the pool where Megan instantly scraped her nose on the rough concrete on the pool’s bottom. It left a large angry red mark on her nose that would take the rest of the week to heal.

Oklahoma City was a quick stop, just to get us going so we wouldn’t have to face an unbearable drive from Amarillo all the way through to Kansas City the next day. A fine hotel breakfast later (full of buffet items such as waffles, muffins, “orange” juice, toast, fruit, yogurt, and spongy eggs) we packed into the van and started on our way to Kansas. We had a plan to have plenty of adventures along the way, so instead of stopping for lunch in a regular fast food place, Suzanne brought picnic supplies and the notion that we’d find a nice park or two for our lunches. This was, unfortunately, a bit harder to do than we had expected.

We stopped for lunch in Emporia, Kansas, and started hunting down a city park, but since I didn’t have the miracle of Google Maps with me, we simply drove around looking for a large green space. We thought we had discovered one, but it was just someone’s big yard, and they were having a garage sale so that would have been awkward to interrupt them with our peanut butter and jelly. We finally stumbled onto the campus of Emporia State University and found a beautiful lake (complete with fountain) in the center of campus. The only other people around were part of a wedding party on the other side of the lake. We got a little closer to them, though, and I whispered to Suzanne that the bride looked like she was about 14. That’s when Suzanne gave me a quick cultural lesson. It was no wedding. It was a quinceañera, which is an Hispanic traditional coming-of-age party for 15 year old girls. The girls wear grand dresses and the boys (at least at this party) wear formal suits. There was a limo, photographers, the whole shebang.

A few sandwiches and plums later we were back on the road, heading for Kansas City. Since I am a self-declared expert on Kansas City because I’ve been there two times, I immediately navigated us in all sorts of wrong directions. We finally, after little grief, found our hotel, unpacked, jumped on the beds, and headed for Union Station, home of Many Interesting Places and Science City, a science museum for kids. I'm always on the lookout for interesting science museum-type attractions and ideas, mainly to steal them for our own Discovery Center in Amarillo, and Science City had quite a few things to pilfer. The Mr. E Hotel was one of our favorites - it was filled will illusions and mind-bending exhibits and made us oooh and aaah and laugh at how odd things look when you bend light the wrong way.

We spent the rest of the afternoon there, getting kicked out with the last of the stragglers toward dinner time. We decided then to try some famous Kansas City barbecue, so we found a restaurant that the hotel clerk told us had tasty food and immediately got confused on ordering, waiting, sitting, and eating. Apparently there are some places that expect you to know exactly what you want as soon as you walk in the door (in this place, you order at the front in a cafeteria-style line and then wait as they load up your tray), which is a difficult thing to guarantee when you have three hungry kids who are on the lookout for nothing but chicken nuggets and lemonade. We accidentally doused some of the barbecue with spicy sauce (the restaurant had buckets of the stuff at a counter - you were supposed to fill up little sauce containers from them and take them back to your table) so the kids wanted nothing to do with any meat that had been contaminated with even a drop of the sauce. But kids, being kids, have the tenacity to survive merely on french fries and acting goofy at the table, so with that (and the promise of swimming at the hotel pool after dinner) we had a delightful dinner.

The next day we spent a good time at the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art (use the underground parking garage; you get to park under the fountain) and then had a picnic in the sculpture garden. The kids climbed on a sculpture of a badminton birdie, which was great fun, until we read a sign that said, "Do not climb on the sculpture." And Colleen, who is proud of her reading and volume, broadcast that we were in violation of the law to most residents of Kansas, Missouri, and Oklahoma.

After we slunk out of there, illicit photos in hand, we took a little breather at the hotel and then piled back in the van for the Heart of American Shakespeare festival in Southmoreland Park (right across from the art museum). The kids helped a juggler juggle and then joined in a kid's version of "Much Ado About Nothing" in which I had a part as well (as a villain no less), and then off we went, filled with culture, to fill up on cheeseburgers and shakes at a diner down the road.

Day three sent us back on the road to Quincy, Illinois where Suzanne's Uncle Jim lives. On our way we passed a sign next to a dirt road. The sign said "Covered Bridge, 3 miles." Now that's a tough one to resist. A covered bridge. A dirt road. A mysterious, somewhat descriptive sign. It had all the makings of a fine adventure. So we took the road less traveled, stirred up a few sandstorms of white dirt behind us, and headed for the bridge. We parked in a small lot at the end of the road and walked a half mile or so to the bridge that happened to be sitting there silently, right in the middle of the woods. It would have been a creepy little hike without all the kids making noise. It was the kind of setting where you'd expect a guy with one tooth and a chain saw to jump out from behind a tree and chase you back to your car where you realize you've dropped your keys and you have no gas.

Quincy, Illinois is right on the Mississippi river, and it's just a fifteen (or so) minute drive to Hannibal, home of Mark Twain, riverboats, and tourist stuff. We spent a couple of days in Quincy at Suzanne's uncle's house, and Uncle Jim took us on the big Quincy tour, pointing out interesting places and telling us the history of the area (in Amarillo, we have large storage buildings for people who have too much junk. They usually have signs on them that say "Air Conditioning!" In Quincy, they store stuff in caves where the temperature is a balmy 50 something degrees). Uncle Jim is a great guy. He's always up to something, whether it's teaching kids to read or dancing or playing the guitar or riding his bike 30 miles a day. We took a spin over to Bonkers one morning (while Suzanne was having some vacation fun doing laundry; I found that a few birds preferred one of my t-shirts on the clothesline when I discovered a series of packages staining my sleeves later that day) and climbed through a gigantic playground of ropes and nets and slides. It was a blast, but as all things like this seem to end in controversy and tears when Alex found a little rope swing hidden away. As soon as he discovered it, Megan and Colleen desperately wanted to swing on it to, completely ignoring the other ten thousand acres of wacky (and air conditioned!) fun they could be having. I guess that's the thing with people. The grass is always greener on the other side of the bouncy, multi-colored, socks-are-mandatory indoor playground.

We spent a day in Hannibal taking tours of the Mark Twain museum, the Becky Thatcher house, and all things Huck Finn. It was brutally hot, and I cannot figure out how people in the 1860's used to walk around in full regalia and be comfortable (especially in a river town where the humidity is 300%). We took a riverboat ride up and down the Mississippi, watched some massive barges make their way south, and learned about the small islands in the middle of the river where Mark Twain and five billion mosquitoes used to play together. That night we were wiped out, but we were awake enough to enjoy some of Uncle Jim's songs on the guitar and have a frantic game of Uno around the kitchen table.

The next day we began our trip up Illinois to Chicago, but first we stopped in Springfield to visit the Abraham Lincoln museum. We thought we'd blow an hour in there, looking at photos and keeping the kids from destroying valuable artifacts from the Civil War, but we were utterly, completely, and stupidly wrong. The Lincoln museum was fantastic, absolutely amazing, filled with technical wizardry that kept the kids' attention and taught them things that I didn't even know. Sure, I can boast about how I pretty much know the secrets to special effects, and how it's easy to make a spaceship fly by a planet in Maya, but I had no idea how they pulled off what they did in that museum. For instance, we thought we'd catch the Ghosts of the Library show, so we walked into a large waiting area with TV's mounted on the walls, like TV's in hospital rooms, and stood in the middle of the room with about thirty other people, wondering what to do next. The TV's were broadcasting a lecture about the museum by a curator, and we thought that was the whole of the presentation. We were about the leave when two large doors opened and we were all ushered into another room, this one with benches and a stage in front that was behind three glass panels. On the stage was a library, complete with bookshelves, desks, paintings on the wall, you name it. A minute later a man walked out into the center of the library set. He greeted us and began telling us the story of the library. And then, suddenly, ghosts start appearing. I mean, these looked like what ghosts should look like: wispy, creepy, transparent. They didn't look projected; they didn't look two dimensional. They had depth and, oddly, substance. It was amazing. I have, even now, no idea how they did it. I love magic shows like that.

If you're thinking of going through Springfield, Illinois, stop by the Lincoln museum and spend some time. Don't miss it. It's really quite fantastic.

Afterward, full of civil war history (oh, the War Gallery's Civil War in Four Minutes is mandatory viewing at the museum - amazing work) we hit the road again for Chicago. We ate lunch in the car (we had planned to eat after the museum, but we hadn't planned on spending as much time in there as we did), and then the kids had a little quiet time - rather, Suzanne and I had some quiet time. Then, suddenly, we knew we were close to Chicago. We knew this because we started traveling at about one mile an hour. This, I understand, is called traffic, a concept we are not quiet used to on the high plains of Texas (although once a large semi full of cattle overturned on the freeway, and it took the police a couple of hours to round up all the cows).

Hotels in big city downtown areas are always stressful because you usually have to pull up for the valet, unload all your stuff (three kids = a lot of stuff), move out of the way quickly, let the valet take the car, and then stand there stupidly on the sidewalk like refugees. There wasn't a lot of parking where we were, but that was okay because the hotel was happy to park the van for us and charge us a slightly magnificent, college tuition-type fee for the privilege.

Our hotel was in a great spot, about a block from Millennium Park, a few blocks from the Art Institute of Chicago and within walking (and free trolly) distance to the Navy Pier and other places of adventure. Rather than bore you with the excruciating details of everything we did (plus I'll finally get around to posting this entry if I can cheat), I'll mention the highlights: the U-boat at the Museum of Science and Industry was breathtaking (and the history of video games exhibit was fun too); Suzanne had the brilliant idea of finding ten famous works of art from The Art Institute of Chicago's website and then having a scavenger hunt through the museum to find everything on the list; there's a children's area at the art institute with a stage and dress-up clothes, so the kids put on a kabuki theater style play while Suzanne and I, weary from too much postmodernism, relaxed in the audience.

For dinner we thought we'd have a nice stroll through the Taste of Chicago, find some interesting food, and have a pleasant picnic outside. Unfortunately, the Taste of Chicago had, roughly, 8.7 million people with the same plan we had. Once we saw the mass of humanity all shoved together, eating off of paper plates, and all walking like a migratory herd to some nonspecific place, we thought the better of it, walked the opposite way, and had dinner at a German restaurant.

Back to Millennium Park for a moment: (I won't really mention the reflecting bean sculpture because it was under construction while we were there, which disappointed me because, well, it was a reflecting bean and I wanted to touch it) on our earlier tour of the park we had noticed a large shallow pool, maybe a few inches deep, in which kids were running and splashing. Two five story towers made out of glass blocks sat at the ends of the pool. Each tower had a waterfall running down its sides and showed a video of different faces, each face looking at the other across the pool. At times, the faces looked like they were concentrating and then they started to blow, and when they did, a stream of water shot out from the tower to the pool below. It didn't take long for Colleen, Megan, and Alex to figure out that, clad in bathing suits, they could watch the faces and get a good idea of when the water was about to gush. Then they got into position, right at the perfect spot to catch the water, and seconds later they were doused in a thick, cold jet of the stuff. Then they ran up to the video tower (which was now showing scenes of a river and waterfall) and they waited for another burst of water that would come flooding down the face of the tower, as if someone 50 feet up had dumped a bucket on all the kids below. And then they laughed and laughed and laughed.

After that we walked back to the hotel, wrapped in smuggled towels, and acted nonchalant, nodding to the bellman as if we were simply coming in from an evening stroll.

The next day we had a few grand adventures with my father-in-law and mother-in-law's friend Moe, who has a condo in downtown Chicago and knows all the secret in and outs of the city. We met him early in the day and made our way to the Navy Pier where we spent a few hours at the Children's Museum. Afterward Moe took us on a hunt to find the best hamburger in Chicago, but the best place was closed until 3:00, so we ended up at another restaurant that just happened to have a menu item called the best hamburger in Chicago. I tried to give Moe a hard time about that, saying that we would never really know who had the best hamburger and this must have been his ploy to force us to visit again. And of course we would come again. Moe was a great host and a terrific guy, and he was full of Chicago stories, tidbits, and small details of such interest that he could, if he wanted, run his own underground Chicago tour company. Moe went out of his way to show us a good time, and he blew practically an entire day doing it. If the United States had an Ambassador to the World, I would nominate Moe. That, and he was great with the kids, and that's a rare talent for a lot of people.

After we wore Moe down, he bid us farewell at the Water Tower, and disappeared into the throngs as we rode away on the trolly. Our plan now was to meet my brother-in-law Dan at The Field Museum. Dan had started the drive into downtown Chicago from his home near Lake Zurich about 15 years earlier, and so we had made the cell phone plan to meet at the museum, spend an hour or two looking an dinosaurs, and then head over to dinner. Unfortunately, by the time our trolly made its stop, and we transfered to another one, and then walked a few blocks to find Dan on the museum stairs, the place had closed for the day. So we focused our mental powers and sad, tired faces on Dan and convinced him to pay for all of our tickets at the Shedd Aquarium (actually, Dan is a very nice guy and sprung for the tickets on his own volition, and if he ever thinks that I believe he's a great guy, I might never hear the end of it and will probably have to serve him icy drinks with little straws in them during Christmas to make up for my ill chosen words). After the aquarium we made our way to dinner and ended up at Gino's East for pizza. According to Dan, there are two great Chicago pizza restaurants: Gino's and Giordanos, and the debate rages to this day about who has the better pie. On a separate trip to Chicago a few months ago, Dan and I ate at Giordanos, which I found magnificently tasty, and now, after Gino's, I can say with great authority and a booming voice that I prefer Giordanos. Both places serve pizza slices thicker than a mattress and packed with more cheese than a disco theme party, but here was something about Giordanos - the crust maybe - that was divine. I'm seriously considering ordered a frozen one for overnight delivery.

After dinner Dan amazed us by actually finding a free parking space a block away from our hotel. I thought it had to be a mistake, this gaping hole between two large cars on the side of the street, and I was constantly worried that Dan's car was right on the verge of being towed away to be dumped in Lake Michigan or sold to a chop shop in Minnesota. The kids wanted to show Dan the Millennium Park fountain, so we changed them into bathing suits, and once we were there noticed that the crowd was much more sparse than the night before. It took not a couple of seconds to understand why. A cold front had come through town that day and had dropped the temperature of the water in the fountain to a miserably chilly, blue-lip temperature. The kids ran around in the water for a few minutes and then were ready to dry off and get back to the hotel.

And then it was the next morning, which began a day of driving, a long, long day of driving. We had hoped to make it to Oklahoma City, but Missouri stood in our way. Missouri, the land of . . . traffic jams. Midway through the state we started to see signs pop up on the side of the road: "Expect delays. Three hour delays ahead." So there we were, stopped on the interstate with hundreds of other people, in the middle of nowhere, delayed. We concluded people don't pronounce Missouri correctly. It should really be Misery.

But we finally made it and limped into Tulsa at about 8:00. After a quick trip to the hotel pool and a good night's sleep, we made it to Amarillo by 3:00 the next afternoon. After a half-hour of unpacking, moving bags around, and emptying the van, I sat on the sofa and looked out the front window. There the lawn in its shabbiness mocked me and ten minutes later I was outside, wearing my grass-stained shoes, and pushing the lawn mower across the front yard.

And that's when I knew, sweat in my eyes, that vacation was truly over.