My high school friend Serj, his wife Tasha, and their kid Maxwell picked us up in the morning and together we drove around Chicago in search of coffee and donuts. Which we found.
Downtown Chicago is nice - clean, good looking buildings, wide streets, and a much more American and traditional feel than New York or Boston. We'd seen much of it on our last visit four years ago when we visited for Serj's wedding, so it wasn't all new to us.
After that we headed to the Lincoln Park Zoo, where admission was free - apparently Maxwell's third or so zoo visit, but a first for me and Sharon together. We were short on time but saw plants, lions, tigers, monkeys, rhinos, and sea lions.
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| Read the sign! (inside joke...) |
Finally we all went to Serj and Tasha's condo in a very nice recently renovated traditional Chicago building. By the way, Maxwell developed a particular attachment to this bottle of lemonade:
Before leaving Serj's we all picked up giant burritos (they must have weighed two pounds each) from a favorite place of theirs and then got dropped back at the truck yard where we had left our truck and camper.
We quickly packed up and left Chicago for Wisconsin. On the way we picked up groceries, finally filling the fridge and giving some legitimacy to our decision to bring along the camper.
Our 3.5 hour drive finally brought us to Wisconsin Dells, a resort town that is actually "America's Waterpark Capital" with over a dozen water parks of various types and sizes. As I write this we are checked in and set up at a nice campground where we plan to spend the next two nights. Tomorrow it's time to check out America's largest Waterpark - "Noah's Ark."
By the way, now that we are finally past Chicago the plan is to slow down the pace of driving, get off the interstates and begin exploring. The landscape has already changed from mostly woods to open fields and farms.