A Week into Vacation!

Here we are. A week into vacation and I haven't blogged about anything yet! I would love to go back and write about everyday and post pictures. We will see if I have time to do that.

As of this moment, we are hanging out in Chicago. We are not at a traditional campground, but at a truck and bus parking spot. As I was looking for spots to stay around Chicago, the closest place I could find was an hour outside of the city. When we park that far out, we would either need to drive into the city and pay parking or take public transportation, which is expensive in this city. As I got looking online, somebody mentioned this place in downtown Chicago. It is $35 a night, but since it is a parking lot, there is no electricity, water, or even a dump station! But we are a mile away from downtown Chicago.

When we left Illinois Beach State Park yesterday, we filled up with water, so that is not an issue. We will not take showers, so we should be fine. Matt brought along two generators, so that ran our air conditioner last night. As for a dump station, we will just dump when we get to our next park today.

One of the main reasons we stayed here was because it was so close to everything. We got in about noon yesterday, so we thought we would take the afternoon and enjoy some museums downtown (that we had free passes for.)  Google told us it was .8 miles from where we were, so we thought it was easy to walk. Well, the parking lot is actually further away from downtown and it was almost TWO miles to walk downtown yesterday. It took a lot longer than we thought! Plus it was pretty hot out and we didn't quite know where we were going.

We made it downtown after awhile. Matt, Courtney, and Christian ventured to the Planetarium and I took Megan and Micah and we went to the Field Museum. When we were done, we wanted to go out for some Chicago pizza. We had a delimma though! We didn't want to venture too far away from the museums because it would be even further to walk home! We could take the train, but the train station was quite a ways away from our camper too. We didn't want to be walking home late at night in the area between the train station and our camper. It was by a convention center, so there weren't a lot of people around and looked like it could be pretty dark at night.

We eventually decided to walk back to the camper and get the truck. When we got home, we all got popsicles because we were so hot. Our camper was also hot because we didn't have electricity and Matt hadn't hooked the generators up yet. (Why run them when we weren't even there??)

We all had pizza on our mind, so I started looking on Groupon for a great, cheap pizza place. We found a few, but parking is a huge problem in Chicago, so we didn't feel we could do anything near downtown. We felt we would need to drive out to the suburbs a little bit.

After looking through Groupon for awhile, we didn't really find anything that was working out, either due to parking, location, closing at 5 pm, etc. We then went to Travel Advisor and got some recommendations. After looking through these, we found some, but they were pretty expensive.

What do we do? Go to a cheap place we didn't really know anything about or take a recommendation and spend some extra money. We didn't know what to do!! We wanted something at a reasonable price where we could park without an issue due to our oversized truck!

Eventually I found a place on Groupon named "Gulliver's" that had great recommendations and it was a little ways out in the suburbs. We decided to head that way! It was almost 7 pm and everybody was getting crabby! About 40 minutes later, we arrived there, but it was NOT in the best neighborhood. We saw the outside of the building and Matt said, "NO WAY!"  So now we were about 45 minutes away from our camper and still no food. :(

Matt continued driving as I looking on google for pizza places. I found a Dominoes and we headed that way. It wasn't Chicago style pizza, but it was still pizza!

Around 8 pm, we arrived at Dominoes and got two medium pizzas for $11. There was even an area in the restaurant to eat! Those pizzas were gone pretty quickly. I kind of laughed at our cashier though. I had to give him my zip code when I paid and he asked where we were from. I said we were from Nebraska. He said, "Is that by Los Angeles or something??" Um, NO! I kind of had to give him a geography lesson! I said, "We are in Illinois, right? You go through Iowa and then you will be in Nebraska." This is why you need to learn geography!! Nebraska is not by Los Angeles!

We drove the 30 minutes home and put the kids to bed. Matt turned the generators on and they did a great job overnight! I was impressed!!

It is now 8:30 am and we need to leave this place by noon. There are so many things we could go see this morning, but our truck won't fit in any parking garages, so we can't park in there. The side streets are completely full and it is quite a walk to a train station. I am not sure what we are going to do!

After we leave at noon, we are heading to Michigan. We are going to join up with our friends for the week. We have spots reserved at Hoffmaster State Park along the east side of Lake Michigan, Straits State Park, which is the northern end of Michigan, and then at Taqhemomen State Park, which is in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan.

After we get done in Michigan next Friday, we are going to head into Canada!!