After out 1600 miles tour to Orlando, I decided that I would not be doing this kind of travel by car anytime soon. But It just took one phone call and a look at Google Maps to overturn the decision. Most of the readers know my love for Udaipur – the city of lakes and how emotional I am to get back there. My friend, Amy who is from Wisconsin was planning a trip and gave me a call, I just asked for some time to decide. I just Googled Madison and first thing that popped us was the map of Wisconsin, I saw two big lakes and decided to go on the trip.
First destination was Chicago, 836 miles and we have one day to cover. We traveled through scenic West Virginia, Windy Kentucky and Rainy Indiana and by the time we reached Chicago it was late night. Driving through Chicago downtown was very scenic and I got first glimpses of Sears Tower.
Forgot to add here, we had very flexible plan so we decided to spend next day visiting Chicago. Our plan had the first blow when we found out that some parts of Shedd Aquarium were on maintenance and we could not see Sharks. We decided to go to Sears Tower and walk to Navy Pier. With the map screenshots on my iPod I was all set to explore Chicago. It’s better to take public transport in big cities, so we decided to take Metra.
Finding Sears Tower using map wasn’t tricky, as we just had to find the tallest building in neighborhood. Our first impression after seeing Sears Tower was, it does not seems too tall. But when we thought about it again, it was clear all the nearby building were tall too and without the contrast of tall/short it was hard to appreciate the architecture marvel of 70s. As soon we entered the tower, we were hit by bad news that visibility at top of tower has reduced and there is no point going up.
Sears Tower in cloud cover
We decided to walk to Navy Pier which was 2.5 miles from Sears Tower. Even though I trained myself at the lost art of reading atlas, I am used to electronic maps so much that I forgot to point the static map in right direction and we were lost for a couple of minutes. Once we found the right direction, it was easy to figure out which direction to head to. But weatherman was once again wrong and instead of sunshine we were faced with cold and chilling winds and our jackets were not enough to protect us.
Walking was fun as we were at Rivewalk and could appreciate the beauty of Chicago and could lean more about city with the monuments on the way. On the way we saw statue of Mr. Chicago, Mr. Hey Hey and George Washington. We also found out that Chicago is not called Windy City because: of the windy nature but NY newspaper used to refer them as “windy” with respect to their baseball team. “The ‘windy’ part of Windy City refers to Chicago broadcasters/reporters as being windy or blustery.”
We also found a building (don’t know the name and Google/Maps and Wikimapia did not help me find it) (WGN Radio building, Thanks Amy for pointing it out) which had stones from different parts of worlds/monuments put on the outer wall. It was exciting to see part of a Pyramid, a brick from Abraham Lincoln’s house, stone from House of parliament (London), White House, a temple in India and Peking, Cambodia, Antarctica and many other famous places. This also proved the point that if one wants to enjoy the city he should take a walk.
Lake Michigan
Then I had the first sight of Lake Michigan, it was not completely frozen but I could see the ice floating on water. Chicago skyline looks great from it and I wondered how beautiful it would be at night. We moved ahead to Navy Pier, its a public place sort of like a shopping complex mixed with entertainment. We went to the glass museum where there were a lot of beautiful artifacts, modern and historic. It was quite interesting to notice what artists can do with glasses, by just adding color to them and placing them at different levels.
Navy Pier
We wanted to go up on Ferris Wheel but it was cold and windy, we decided to go there just to find out that we were the only two people ready to go up. We went up and it was pleasure watching city from top. (The picture of Sears Tower is taken from top of Ferris Wheel). We had no energy left to walk and fight cold at the same time so took the bus to Metra station. Spring Break has started and with a BANG!
We visited Chicago again on our way back from Wisconsin and this time we just visited Sears Tower (It’s name will be changed in July, since Sears has moved out of building). We had to stand in queue for 45 minutes to get into Skydeck and as “sincere” MBA students we discussed which server model should be used to reduce queue length. There was a movie about history, difficulties, planning of Sears Tower. We took the elevator which goes at 1600 foots/sec. Interesting part was that we do not realize how fast the elevator was going, except the vibration at the end and I don’t think they were because of speed it was the altitude (might be slack in ropes, wind). We went to 99th floors (and since it was from basement I believe we went up 100 floors). View from the top was magnificent, we could almost see the entire city.
