Final day in Chicago

Yeah, yeah, getting a bit behind here I know. I'm kinda thinking the last few weeks' worth of entries will be filled out and illustrated over the next week or so when I get home and download the (gulp) 356 meg of photos I have sitting on my CF cards...

Our final day in Chicago was very satisfying as we ticked off all the things we'd been wanting to do. Had a great breakfast at a little cafe round the corner from the hostel called Gourmand before heading off to find the free trolley bus to Navy pier with supplies picked up from Seven Eleven on the way,

First stop at Navy pier was the ferris wheel where we took great delight in eating our bags of Cracker Jacks while at the top.If this wasn't enough excitement for the morning, our next experience was the 75 minute speedboat ride and architectural river tour on the SeaDog with very entertaining commentary from a chap called Chris.
We staggered off the Seadog and onto the trolley back into town for a photo stop at the Gehry music pavilion in Millennium Parkthe Anish Kapoor cloudgate sculptureand the Parisian Metra entrance way which handily happened to be the place we needed to be to catch the train out to the final stop of the day - Colleen Moore's Fairy Castle at The Museum of Science and Industry.We were very fortunate as originally we had planned to visit the Fairy Castle first and do Navy Pier in the afternoon but changed our minds at the last minute and switched them around. Halfway out to the museum on the train, the heavens opened and there was torrential rain - perfect timing for a trip inside!

By this time we were completely stuffed so it was back to the hostel to collect our stuff and into a taxi out to the airport hotel which we'd booked for our final night in Chicago. The place was like the Marie Celeste - none of the restaurants were open, nor was the nightclub. We discovered that the hotel had a capacity of 500 guests and there were (wait for it) 20 of us staying that night! No wonder nothing (except the bar with a very bored looking bartender) was open.

So for dinner we ended up having takeout Chinese on our (lovely comfy) queen sized beds, washed down with a bottle of plonk from the bar and followed by free Krispy Cremes they had in the (closed) cafe.Even better we discovered a 2 hour Sex and The City special on TV which we watched. So the evening turned out to be rather excellent, if not what we had originally expected.

Of course, I woke up at 2am worried I'd overslept and missed the plane. And it was actually a good thing I did as I rechecked my flight details and discovered I was flying at 7:05am not 7:50am as I had thought. And I hadn't repacked. So even though I reset my alarm and went back to bed I couldn't sleep until I finally gave up at 4am and got up and packed. A great start to a very long haul back to Australia...