Finally made it to Chicago! Today we went to the top of the Sears—uh, Willis—Tower to step into a glass bay window 103 stories above Adams Street to look down at the start of the Route 66 road we’re going to travel in a few days. Let me tell you, stepping out onto a glass ledge—nevermind it is stressed to five tons and enclosed in thick glass—was, for me, TERRIFYING! Doesn’t sound like long, but it took me about 15 seconds of our 60 second allotment in the glass bay just to make that first step! But I wanted to do it because that side of the Willis Tower looks directly down at the beginning (pretty close to the beginning, anyway) of Route 66.
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| 103 stories above Adams Street, the start of Route 66. |
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| Took all my will power to stand there! |
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| If you look very, very carefully, you can see the projecting glass bays almost at the top of the Sears Tower. |
Because we now have Masters degrees in Chicago Bus Schedules, after that expedition we took a bus to the start of an Architectural Cruise. We chose our cruise wisely because, of the cruises we saw, ours was the only one that had any portion of the top deck under a canopy. When it is in the 90s with 90% humidity, you NEED that cover. We had a great tour guide who filled our head with esoteric fact after esoteric fact, very little of which I remember, other than that the Chicago has the tallest building in the world that was designed by a woman (Jeanne Gang, the St. Regis, at 1168 ft., the third tallest in Chicago).
Some random views of Chicago from our tour.
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| This is a multi-million $ projector for the nightly projected art show. It is so sophisticated that it can project the light show only on the facade of the Merchandise Mart, not into the windows of the building! |
After we collapsed back at the hotel (did I tell you it was 93 degrees and 90% humidity?), we got ready for our dinner at the Signature Room at the 95th in the Hancock Building (5th tallest in Chicago) with Jessie and Gary—who drove one and a half hours each way just to have dinner with us! Fabulous dinner and a fabulous view. They headed home and we headed to the bar on the 96th floor for an after dinner drink.
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| The Signature Room is at the top of the Hancock Building. |
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| Randy and me with our friends Gary and Jessie at dinner. |
That would have been a nice end to a fabulous evening if I hadn’t checked my texts and found that our oldest friend had succumbed to the cancer she was diagnosed with only a month before. It has thus been a difficult evening and day.
Life does go on, and Marty would not have wanted us to mourn, she loved to travel and she would have wanted us to continue our exploring of Chicago and to continue our upcoming drive along Route 66. So we walked around Chicago on Michigan Ave. window shopping at Tiffany’s and Cartier and Nordstom’s and Bloomies (Bloomingdale’s Department Store for the Aussies reading this). Randy is grateful we only window-shopped.
Tomorrow we ransom the car and make our way to the absolute beginning of Route 66. Well, the current absolute beginning of Route 66. It has, at various times, been near Lake Shore Drive and Jackson Street. It is now just off Michigan Avenue, on Adams. Jackson was the first but then the powers that be in Chicago decided to make Jackson one-way the wrong way. And we’re going to TRY to have breakfast at Lou Mitchell’s (not to be confused with Lou Malnatti’s where you can get some of Chicago’s best deep dish [is there any other kind in Chicago?] pizza).
Then onward to Springfield, IL, home of Abraham Lincoln and Lou Pisani.
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