Day three of our tour of Chicago.  It’s impossible to see much of Chicago in three days, but we tried.  We drove all over and saw parts of Chicago most people don’t see.  It’s a very busy, active city. People walking or riding bicycles everywhere and the cars.  Oh, the cars and the buses that would pull right out in front of you at the last second.  But David is a good driver and got us everywhere without a scratch(although we did get within inches of some vehicles at times.)   I would say, “David, that car almost hit us,” and he would say, “Oh, it was a mile away from us!”   Actually, by day three, we were old hands at getting through the traffic, David with his driving and me not screaming.  The grandkids sitting in the back poking each other and laughing and not paying attention to the traffic at all.  But why should they?

We saved the best for our last day in my humble opinion. The Adler Planetarium.  I have always loved looking at the stars and when I was growing up, I thought I would like to be an astronomer.   On the farm where I grew up all you needed to do was walk out the back door at night and you could see millions of stars in the sky.  Not like it is today with so many outside lights on at night.  Where I live now I can see stars, but not nearly as many as I could on the farm.  I would dream of other planets and traveling through space.  We could see the Milky Way very clearly in the night sky.  When we travel out west, I want to go to as  little populated places as we can to see the night sky.  I love watching the astronauts shoot up into space and wish I were there with them.   So, the Adler Planetarium was the perfect destination for me.

My grandson’s name is Adler, by the way, so he thinks the planetarium is named after him.  We had to get him a shirt with his name on it.

In this exhibit, you could move the astronauts around and put them into their capsule.

This was supposed to show you how it felt to be weightless and jump on the moon.

Believe me, I didn’t feel weightless and this was a good leg workout.  Wish I had one of these at home.

Okay, I don’t know why this picture is sideways, but this is our younger grandson.  He wants to be an architect, though.  He likes to build things.

We saw the Milky Way.

We saw a comet.

I didn’t get a lot of pictures at the planetarium, but there was so much to see and read.  We went to a couple of the shows they gave.  The one I liked best was about the universe and the galaxies.  When we went into it, they gave us all a penny and during the show, they asked us to hold our pennies up to the picture of the universe and said that in space the size of Lincoln’s eye  there were hundreds of galaxies.  We sometimes think our galaxy is the end of the universe.  There are so many they haven’t all been counted.  Each with their own planets and suns.  Seeing this just made my belief in God more confirmed when I think how all this was created.  Our sun is just the right distance from earth that we don’t freeze or burn up.  The more I learn about the world and the universe we live in, the more I believe there is a great Creator who made all this.  I see it every day in my garden.  It’s a wonderful world and universe we live in if we just look around.  We people are like ants scurrying here, there and everywhere, never stopping to look at the beautiful world around us and how everything works together.  How absolutely everything points to a God who made it.  I love science and I love God and I believe they are very compatible.  Anyway,  I loved seeing about the universe.  I could have watched it over and over again, but, alas, we had to leave so that others could see the show.

After the planetarium we had planned to go the the Field Museum, but we were meeting our son at a restaurant for dinner so we decided to find someplace to park and walk as I really needed to get out and walk since we hadn’t walked enough. Ha.

So we finally found a little park and David drove by a parking lot thinking in Chicago he could find a “free” parking space, but we ended back at the parking lot and paid fifteen dollars so I could get out and walk.  We were at Lincoln Park, a small, free, gasp, park with a zoo and farm animals and it was lovely to walk under trees.   It was very enjoyable for me.  My two oldest grandchildren were getting antsy as this wasn’t their thing.  But, hey, humor grandma for a while.  Anyway we had to kill some time and what better place than at a park.

Our final destination to end out trip to Chicago was Ed Debevic’s a popular restaurant there.

Ed Debevic’s where the waiters and waitresses are rude and dance on the tables and in the aisles.   It’s a fun place.  Our waiter gave us all these hats, threw our napkins at us, asked me why I was eating like a chipmunk, nibbling my food, called my granddaughter a “princess” for ordering a salad and I won’t tell you what the waitress said to David as she delivered his very large hotdog, but we laughed for several minutes after that one.  And it was a very large hotdog.  We had a good time, but all good things must end and we went back to our motel to pack for the trip home the next day.

Our trip home was called “torturing the grandchildren day” as we took the long way home and stopped at a couple of quilt shops.  We were asked over and over again when we would get home and we kept saying, “When we get there.”  David and I would have stopped at every antique store we saw, and we saw a lot of them, but well, you know, grandkids.    They cramped our style.  We decided we would have to come back to these antique stores sans the grandchildren one day.

All in all, we had a great time, but it was good to be home again to my garden and dogs and chickens and less traffic.

Chicago is an amazing city and we hope to go back again.  Bye.