Touring Chicago Suburbs and City

While not originally part of our Summer Escape plans, Nathan had the opportunity to go to a soccer game with his brother at Soldier Field in Chicago. So we made a quick detour in our road trip and made it a whole week of exploring and reminiscing.

Being the last week of July, the Midwest was having a lovely heat and humidity spike. Somewhere before Nebraska, we hit a “wall” and after that, the air was THICK and stayed that way for days. So, the start of our week had me really nervous that we wouldn’t get to explore like we wanted to.

Fun fact – this year I learned all about corn sweat and how when it gets hot, the corn sweats to cool down and the humidity levels rise… as if it wasn’t humid already!

Thankfully, the mornings were a bit better, so before work on Monday, we decided to get in our first bike ride. The hotel was right next to Popular Creek and Shoe Factory Preserve, which was a fantastic 10-mile bike ride. Part of it was dedicated to horses, so the crosswalks had two buttons for different heights 😄.

Since we have visited and lived in Chicago a few times now, we had a list of restaurants and food that we knew we wanted to try and since I am ignoring my diet at the moment, I happily indulged!

First, we went to Gumari Thai (website here), which has my favorite peanut sauce and a lovely waitress named Apple.

Then it was already Wednesday and time for the soccer game! Unfortunately, the weather didn’t want to cooperate and it was pouring rain for a large portion of the night. Nathan made the best of it and still had a blast watching the two soccer games with first row seats!!

Since the games lasted until almost midnight, Nathan decided to take the rest of the week off and relax on Thursday while I worked. I did take Friday off though, so we could explore a little bit more.

Thursday, we were able to check another restaurant off our list and get the infamous ribs at Barnelli’s and I enjoyed an Italian Beef at Portillo’s. While we do have Portillo’s in Phoenix, only Chicago has the sister Italian restaurant Barnelli’s which has delicious, fall-off-the-bone ribs that Nathan loves.

After dinner, we went back to hang out with family and play some games, and now we have a new game to add to our rotation! Pandemic Reign of Cthulhu, or Cthulhu for short, was a great game where you play as a collaborative group against the board. I am all about strategy games that don’t make you competitive against each other. It took us 3 times to finally win, but it was fun every time!

On Friday, we decided to spend some more time outdoors and went to Morton Arboretum. Normally, we go to walk around a specific event, like the Christmas light display, but this time we decided to put our bikes to good use and bike the entire park.

We had never been to the west side of the park, so we started there, and made a loop on that side and then on the east side. It was about 7.5 miles in total, with a surprising number of hills for Chicago.

Sadly, you can’t take bikes on the pathways, so once we had finished the ride on the paved road, we switched to walking around the park to enjoy the scenery and current art exhibit.

Saturday was our last day to explore, so we knew we had to make it downtown. Plus, it had been a while since we had done all the touristy things so we wanted to visit Navy Pier and the Bean (or Cloud Gate if you’re boring like that 😉).

We started with a delicious breakfast at Wildberry! All of their food is amazing and worth the wait. Nathan got the Berry Crepes, and I had eggs, hash-browns, and some heavenly cinnamon roll pancakes.

After breakfast, we drove down to the Cumberland Park and Ride and took the Blue Line into downtown.

Our first stop was something new. We decided to do one of the very popular architecture tours via the river.

In the past, we really hadn’t spent much time around the river and a few years ago they built the Riverwalk, which lets you walk along the length of the river with tons of restaurants and seating to relax. We were very impressed!

For our tour, we decided to go with First Lady, which seems to be the most popular and best architecture tour of the city, and they delivered!

There is no way I could remember or write down all the interesting facts and information that was shared through the tour, so you will just have to go on your own! However, we did get quite a few amazing photos of the city.

After our tour, we walked over to and through Navy Pier. It is always interesting to see what stays the same or changes over time and Navy Pier has continued to grow over time. Sadly for Nathan, Bubba Gump Shrimp is no longer there.

Once we were done at Navy Pier, a break and food sounded great. We had already checked off all our must-have restaurants, so we decided to go with something new!

Even after all the years spent in Chicago and loving to try new foods, we had never been to the 3rd famous Chicago-style pizza place, Gino’s East and the original location is right downtown, so a quick bus ride later and we were ready to eat!

The verdict! Gino’s East is Nathan’s new favorite! I still prefer the extra cheese from Giordano’s but I will agree that Gino’s sauce tasted better. Granted, it has been a while since we have been to Lou Malnati’s so we may need to make a stop there when we get back to AZ and double check 😉.

After dinner, we walked through most of Mag Mile and stopped by the new Harry Potter store as well as Garrett’s popcorn for a classic Chicago snack.

And even though I was pretty tired and my feet were sore by this point, we came all this way, so we had to go visit the Bean as well. It turned out to be a perfect time for pictures and the classic shot with the city skyline in the reflection.

Happy with our day and week of adventures, we made our way back to the hotel.

While the weather wasn’t perfect, we made the best of our week in Chicago and would always happily come visit again! 😊

If you want to see all of our pictures, you can check them out here on Google Photos!