We Took the Dog to Chicago

Chicago turned out not to be very accessible for canine tourists, alas.

Luna did seem to enjoy walking the city streets, other than when the noisy "L" was passing overhead. So the big kid got to do a decent amount of sightseeing just by wandering the streets around our hotel and letting Luna sniff all the fascinating urban sniffs:

And although the W Chicago tacked on an absolutely ridiculous $125 pet fee for our two-night stay (which I did figure out in advance of our reservation, but also close enough to it that I'd already reached the "throw money at the problem until it goes away" stage, meaning we decided to just eat the cost rather than rework our entire Chicago itinerary), Luna--and the rest of us!--were super comfy there:

I'm pretty sure this is her first-ever elevator ride!

It's a lousy photo AND I nearly dropped my phone out the window, but look! We could see the Sears Tower from our room!

I know it's not the Sears Tower anymore, but also it is.

It turns out, though, that Chicago's two biggest tourist parks, Millennium Park and Maggie Daley Park, aren't really parks at all, but "parks," and dogs aren't allowed.

Which, before you accuse me of not doing my research beforehand--y'all, I ALWAYS do my research. You shouldn't have to go to a park's FAQ page and dive down to point number five out of seven just to find out whether or not dogs are allowed. 

Anyway, here's us having sneaked Luna over to The Bean regardless of the rules, sitting her down for our family photo:

It was also honestly too hot for dogs there, anyway. Luna only reluctantly drinks water when she's out and about, so we always have to keep an eye on how hot she's getting. Here's her illegally getting a little shade under the Bean!

And don't think that you can just walk across the beautiful pedestrian bridge and go visit Maggie Daley park instead, because dogs aren't allowed there, either! I mean, we definitely did walk Luna across the pedestrian bridge, but we definitely weren't supposed to. We didn't go all the way into Maggie Daley park, though, and somehow we managed to stay out of tourist jail.

I probably would have been very bummed if all the rest of us haven't already been to Chicago several times and seen most of the tourist sites in the area we stayed in. And knowing ahead of time that the "parks" weren't parks actually probably would have been a good enough reason to change our reservation and rebook a hotel in a different, dog-friendlier location.

But ah, well. It's not every dog that can say that they've sniffed the Sears Tower!

Now to leave Luna and her kid back in the hotel while the rest of us go to a concert!

P.S. Want to follow along with my craft projects, books I'm reading, road trips to random little towns, looming mid-life crisis, and other various adventures on the daily? Find me on my Craft Knife Facebook page!

We Took the Dog to the Beach

My partner and I are planning a big trip to meet up with our older kid in New Zealand this winter after her study-abroad program ends, so that's where our discretionary budget and disposable income are both going for the next few months. But still, I wanted to take some kind of trip this summer, because at this point, and especially with the older kid griping about how she'd missed the deadline for summer internships this year and plans to not make that mistake next year, every summer together could be our last summer all together. 

So what might my darling children want to do for a summer vacation that's possibly our last summer vacation for who knows when? Not express their gratitude that their parent wants to plan a vacation based on their preferences when nobody ever planned a vacation with her preferences in mind when she was a kid, that's for sure! Kids these days, am I right? Anyway, they mostly wanted to fight about it. The older kid really wanted a beach vacation that included her dog, but the younger kid hates beaches the most and would never willingly step onto a beach and do we not know that she is allergic to the sun and of course she does not need Vitamin D because she is "built different," etc. The younger kid wanted to go to a concert in Chicago but concerts, you may know, are not typically dog-friendly and so the older kid would like to understand how could we possibly be so cold-hearted as to so much as consider a vacation that did not include THE DOG.

Fortunately, after 15 years of this kind of crap, I can easily slash my way through these disagreements using my favorite go-to technique, fittingly entitled Please Neither of Them. In this case, Pleasing Neither of Them consisted of a couple of days at the Indiana Dunes National Park, during which the younger kid mostly hung out in the AirBnb or wandered around doing her own thing while the rest of us played at the beach with the dog, followed by a couple of days in Chicago, where the older kid and the dog mostly hung out in the hotel or walked around doing their own thing while the rest of us went to the Cavetown/Mother Mother concert.

The secret to Pleasing Neither of Them is that I personally LOVE both vacation ideas, so a Win/Lose for each of the brats is always a Win/Win for me!

On the way up north, I even got us to stop off for a long detour in Lafayette so we could check a few spots off in our Indiana Culinary Trails passports--I am grinding for that wine tumbler! 

Check out those clouds!

I'm a little mad that I ended up forgetting to order the Famous Fruit Drink from The Igloo on account of 1) the clouds were GLORIOUS that day, thanks to Hurricane Beryl remnants, 2) one of the kids is obsessed with clouds, and 3) the Igloo's parking lot had a tree blocking the "best" cloud so while my partner ordered and waited for our food I walked with the kids down the street to a better spot, thus forgetting to order the fancy juice I'd wanted to bring with us to our AirBnb. 

Ah, well, at least the kid has a dozen more beautiful cloud photos on her ipod to show for our efforts, and we did not forget the most important order, a pup cup for Luna!

We hit up a little more Lafayette local color--

--then finished up the rest of our drive to the lake. 

When my older kid and I took Luna to Indiana Dunes for the first time a few years ago, I LOVED the AirBnb we'd stayed at, so much so that I literally planned this vacation around its open dates. It's centrally located, sure, just minutes from all the beaches, includes ample parking, two bedrooms, and a complimentary bottle of wine, has a fenced-in backyard, and is comfortable and safe, but most importantly, especially to the younger kid, whose Netflix watchlist is longer than mine, it includes Netflix and Disney+, and y'all KNOW how we feel about streaming services! So the younger kid hardly acted put-upon at all during this leg of our trip, not when she could settle in to binge the entirety of Dead Boy Detectives while the rest of us hit up the Indiana Dunes National Park Visitor Center for parking passes and passport stamps and then took Luna to the beach:

She still loves it!

This trip, she discovered the additional joy of chasing seagulls--they just keep coming back for more!--and with three of us to take turns running her to exhaustion, there was also plenty of time for everyone else to do their lovely beach lounging:

Don't you love her doggy life jacket? It's a Ruffwear Float Coat, size medium. 

Below is the face of a dog who woke up from a nap to find themselves buried to the neck in sand! Somehow we got ourselves the world's most patient dog...

Both days at the beach, Luna was so exhausted that she kept trying to lie down during the long walk back to the car, and then she slept like a rock all evening while the rest of us ate take-out pizza and binged Netflix. I feel like I have taken most of my interior design ideas from the AirBnbs I've visited--that's how I learned about the joys of a ridiculously giant couch!--and from this one, I've sort of come away with the idea that wouldn't it be nice to have a TV in the family room. It was so cozy to all hang out on the couch and watch TV together in this AirBnb. But we also don't have anywhere in the family room at home to PUT a TV, if I'm being honest, nor anything to watch on it other than YouTube and library DVDs, sooo...

It WAS super cozy, though!

P.S. Want to follow along with my craft projects, books I'm reading, road trips to random little towns, looming mid-life crisis, and other various adventures on the daily? Find me on my Craft Knife Facebook page!

Thanksgiving in California: 36 Hours in San Diego

Here's our first day in California--at the beach!

My father-in-law is a Navy vet and thanks to him, we were able to stay on the naval base in San Diego for one night. Here's what the beach looks like outside the Navy Lodge:

Here's what my husband looks like after coming upon me lying flat on my back in the sand, camera in hand so I can photograph the helicopters that keep flying directly overhead:

And here's one of the helicopters:

If you blow up the photo enough, you can see that there is totally someone sticking their helmeted head out the door and looking down at me. They're thinking, "Why is that crazy lady lying in the sand taking photos? Must be a spy!"

That's probably not the last time somebody thought that we were spies, either. I photographed EVERYTHING. Who knows when I'll get to sightsee on a military base again!

After we finally managed to drag the kids out of the water, my father-in-law took us on a driving tour so that I could photograph everything else. There were aircraft carriers (we were back at this particular aircraft carrier later in the evening for "Taps," but I had a giant Starbucks coffee in my hands instead of my camera, darn it)--

Yes, I'm going to show you all sides of every aircraft carrier I saw. I'm also humming the "Top Gun" theme at you, just so you know:

--and submarines--

Yes, I'm photographing a submarine THROUGH A FENCE. I'm totally a spy.

--and the most expensive, ugliest destroyer ever built:

The kids had already been to Cabrillo National Monument before with their grandparents (and earned their Junior Ranger badge, because of COURSE), but Matt and I have never been, so we stopped by for a quick look.

Look, another destroyer!

There's a handy spotting guide at the overlook:

I didn't photograph the commissary, either, but we did get road trip snacks and the best bar of soap EVER while we were there. I did not buy a massive toy model aircraft carrier (darn it). The older kid super wanted a Navy sweatshirt, but we did not buy that, either. Our luggage was already worryingly overweight.

Instead, here's an installation of Bob Hope doing USO tours:



It's really beautiful. Next to it, though, is a giant recreation of Unconditional Surrender, which was really gross because every single person was photographing themselves pretending to look up the nurse's skirt.

Nice way to casually degrade women, Tourists!

The next day, we really needed to leave San Diego and end up at Joshua Tree National Park, but first, we had to make two stops at the kids' top requests.

First, doughnuts for the littler kid!

The night before, we'd stayed at a hotel across from Balboa Park with valet service. As the valet handed Matt the keys to the car that morning, he asked where we were headed, and I told him we were going to Donut Bar.

"You really need to try Devil's Dozen," he replied.

So we did both. I mean, of course. And you know what?

We all liked Devil's Dozen better. So thank you, anonymous valet!

This butterbeer doughnut is from Donut Bar:

While Matt and the big kid were in San Diego by themselves, they'd checked out a dog-friendly beach that was right by their hotel. The big kid LOVED it and longed to go back, so before we left San Diego entirely, we did just that. It turned out to be so awesome, indeed, that we accidentally spent the entire morning there:

The kids really loved random doggies coming up to make friends. And a dog only peed on the big kid's sand castle once, and that was after she was finished working on it, anyway.

I didn't get any photos of us actually swimming in the water, but we totally did. It was cold, yeah, but not after the first couple of seconds. Practically nothing to us ice-in-the-bones frozen Midwesterners:

Well, we WERE pretty cold when we finally finished swimming...

No matter, though, because all we did was hop back in the rental car and hit the road. We were on our way to chollo cacti and Joshua trees!