The Bean!

Pittsburgh behind us, we headed off towards Chicago, IL. Being fiscally conscious, the toll road was avoided, but an equally appealing and possibly shorter route was taken. all seemed set to get in around 11 am and have a pleasant lunch ... that is, until we hit what we thought was lunch traffic. Very perceptibly the rate slowed ... and slowed ... until we were actually stopped for so long that I put the SUV in park and considered a quick jaunt to stretch my legs. we were just outside of Chicago ... must have been an accident? Google maps showed nothing ... oh ... wait ... is that the road that we are on that shows a total red line for the entire section that we are stuck in? yep. Apparently, rather than do construction on their major highways at night like some considerate states, Illinois shuts down a three lane highway to one lane. during the middle of the day, with an overabundance of semis pleasantly nudging you ahead with 7 tons of encouragement.

We parked at the McDonalds on the main drag at 12:43. Since we have the extremely useful and life saving Thule rack with 21 cubic feet of added storage - which allows the rear mirror to be used on frequent occasion - it raises our total height to a hand over 7 feet. what height are ALL parking garages set to as a max? 7 feet. needless to say, McDonalds was the only parking under $37 for 3-4 hours that you could pull into. they still charged $18 ... even after we went in and purchased some chicken nuggets (side tangent about nuggets ... nugget of gold, nugget of truth, but the root is still a lump of rock, or pure substance ... how does that fit? sure, chicken lumps, chicken clods, or chicken stones don,t have quite the same ring for a similar terra root ... but nugget?) to appease their parking validation verification.

That done, and us seated expectantly at the original UNO's pizzeria, the only question was just haw ravenous were we from not having eaten yet that day? If you have not ever had a 'real' deep dish Chicago style pizza, it will not seem at all impressive that John and I ordered a Medium and managed to eat all but one and a half slices. the crust edge was easily 4 inches thick, and ever topping was piled inside like a crazy italian casserole. you could not eat this without a fork and knife. a meal unto itself. you could easily live off that pizza and a glass of orange juice. done. no more thinking about food again ever.

but the real highlight was, as per the title heading, THE BEAN. Or, as the artistic mastermind who managed to get funds in excess of 25 Million dollars to create it would like it referred to as, 'the cloudgate'. It is 220,000 pound, highly polished and seamless stainless steal bean. and it is better than any house of mirrors. Despite the many requests for pictures in general, I simply have to wait until I can edit them down enough to post. I have taken over 600 so far. the others combined I am sure are close behind. and catching up too fast!

back to the bean. imagine Escher meets Dali meets someone who apparently could talk his way into a wallet filled with 25 million dollars to construct a huge mirrored bean in the Millennium park. we stayed there for over an hour, just figuring out new ways to take distorted pictures with it. including, but not by any means limited to falling onto one side, handstands, walking up a side while saying down, putting it in the palm of your outstretched hand, posing with your reflection, and just staring transfixed at the interior dome. The birds sitting on top adding their finishing touches lessened a small part of the mystical quality - but in terms of sheer pictorial interaction and amusement - well worth it!

I gave the left over pizza to a sidewalk warmer with a cute cat, we passed a building whose walls are made of blocks that contain pieces of other famous buildings' walls - super cool, and after musing what could possibly force McDonalds to put up FOUR signs on their escalators "for your safety, no crocs are allowed on escalator", we sloughed off into the sunset. well. it was raining. really our plan was just to drive until it stopped raining, so we could set up camp relatively dry.

and with such modest beginnings, the drive commenced.