We Left the Kids at Home and Went to Chicago: Day 2 on the Lakefront Trail

When I showed Matt the above photo, I told him, "This is a startlingly attractive photo of you!" The windswept look works for him!

On our only full day in Chicago, the plan was simply to meander. Our (haunted!) hotel was perfectly located between Grant Park and Millennium Park, so after picking up coffee and breakfast, we ate in the North Garden-- 

I was trying to get a photo of a giant rat that skittered into that door (that leads to the Art Institute of Chicago!), but this beautiful column is also nice.

--then crossed the street to Millennium Park:

I missed taking pictures of my kids in front of cool stuff, so I kept standing Matt in front of cool stuff and taking his picture, instead. Although I am PISSED that that's the shirt he's wearing in all my photos...

I had extra incentive to remember to take photos of myself, because I was super invested in continually texting with the kids and it was fun to send them pictures of every place we went. Will mostly ignored me, because she finds social media a general affront to her being, but Syd, at least, indulged me by cooing over them.

It's pretty important to take every touristy photo possible.

Because I lack the important city skill of minding my business, I also shared photos with the kids of other random people living their best lives.

This was SUPER exciting, because Syd and I had just been scouting that exact same dinosaur hoodie a couple of days before! It was nice to see it on a real human out in the wild, because we could both agree that it did, indeed, look adorable. Syd flat-out refused my offer to accost the hoodie-wearing teen to see what size she was wearing, however. 

Syd also refused my offer to bring her to Chicago so she could take pointe shoe photos in cool spots, too. I wonder if I can find a large stone wall overlooking something picturesque here in town?

I've been in love with the BP Pedestrian Bridge since we first stumbled upon it during our first family visit to Chicago:

Walk over the BP Pedestrian Bridge, stroll through Maggie Daley Park, cross the terrifying S Lake Shore Dr., and there you are on Lake Michigan!

We walked south on the Lakefront Trail, then crossed the terrifying S. Lake Shore Dr. again to visit Buckingham Fountain, whose claim to fame, in my opinion, is that it's directly between our hotel and the lake, and so you can see them both from our window!

Our hotel is there just to my right!

Back to the Lakefront Trail:

Eventually we made it to the Museum Campus. I was dying to go into the Field Museum, but I swore to myself that I was going to try to do something besides spend all my time in museums on this trip, so instead I...

... just walked all the way around the Field Museum and took five billion photos...

Rice Native Gardens

Wedding pictures on the Great Ivy Lawn!!!

Edible Treasures Garden

I want to be a brachiosaurus replica when I grow up!

We continued down the lakefront, because I'd heard that the Skyline Walk around the Adler Planetarium is epic:

It is!

You might notice something is a little different here. Matt, weary of my constant bitching and moaning, has turned his godforsaken Thundercats T-shirt inside-out so that 1) I'll stop griping about it and 2) he can take a nice picture for a change.

Being us, we celebrated the best skyline view in the entire city by, umm... sitting on the concrete steps and reading in front of it for an hour:

I read so many great books on this trip!

At a good stopping point between chapters, we kept wandering--

--and we happened upon 12th Street Beach! We read here for another hour, as well as ate the most delicious street tacos I've ever had:

After tacos and a few more chapters, we walked back along the Lakefront Trail, then took a left. Just as it was starting to drizzle we happened upon the most fortunate of all sights:

A public library!

Obviously, we went in:

I think this is the only photo that I sent the kids that got a response from Will. Works for me, as I only took the picture to make her jealous!

Weirdly enough, I'm also reading a book about a haunted hotel!

Not gonna lie: we stayed in the library until it was about to close. Then we walked through the drizzle back to our haunted hotel, where we ate takeout, watched a marathon of Avengers movies that was inexplicably on cable, and read some more.

It was the perfect day!

We Left the Kids at Home and Went to Chicago: Day 1 at Indiana Dunes National Park

Indiana Dunes has grown up since that cold, rainy day six years ago that I took my freezing, uncomfortable children to Indiana Dunes National Lakeshore.

It's now Indiana Dunes National Park!

Earlier this summer, Matt and I undertook upon a Big Experiment, designed to answer an Important Question: what chaos would occur if we left our children home alone and went on a long weekend trip without them?

The kids both thought that this experiment was a fabulous idea, even Will (Will loves to travel, while Syd loathes it). I don't think it was necessarily the added trust and responsibility that enticed them, but the freedom to stare at their screens for 60 hours straight without an adult asking them to do something to prevent their muscles from atrophying or to get some Vitamin D absorbed into their skin.

In other words, everyone was looking forward to a quite pleasant long weekend!

If you were to leave two teenagers home alone, what would be your biggest fear for them? For me, it was that they'd choke, of all things! Like, I literally did not leave them any grapes. I reminded them how to do the Heimlich on themselves against a countertop. Whenever I talked to one of them while we were gone, I'd be all, "Where is your sister? When is the last time you saw her? Go do a wellness check while I'm on the phone with you."

Spoiler alert: nobody choked, and on this day in particular, while the kids were holed up in separate rooms staring at screens and ignoring each other and the beautiful day outside, Matt and I were hanging out together, soaking in that beautiful day and all the Vitamin D it had to offer:

Not gonna lie: I thought this was a nuclear power plant and I'm a little disappointed that it's not.

Check out how you can see the Chicago skyline from here. We're going to be part of that skyline in just a few hours!

There weren't a ton of people on the beaches on this random Friday afternoon in July, so Matt and I could walk along the lakeshore and explore while pretending that we had the whole place to ourselves.

We've just come directly from the orientation film in the visitor's center (I mean, of COURSE!), so I'm all excited to see the real-life evidence of the interaction between the dunes and the land beyond it:

Mt. Baldy, in particular, is creeping inland quite quickly, and it was interesting to see it covering trees and encroaching on former walking paths:

Since you know that one of my Special Interests is People in Peril in National Parks, you won't be surprised that one of the reasons I wanted to see Mt. Baldy is because of this incident in which a six-year-old fell into a hole that mysteriously opened up in the dune. I'm fascinated by the new science that the near-disaster uncovered, and the fact that it's still not 100% understood.

Also not 100% understood: the corpse of this terrifying lake creature:

Do we or do we not think it's weird that the Great Lakes have no giant underwater creatures living in them?

I don't know if the many fallen trees and pieces of driftwood are further pieces of evidence of erosion from the dunes, or if they come from elsewhere, but they were beautiful and interesting and we took lots of photos:

Before we left to finish our drive to Chicago, I came to my senses and remembered that I couldn't keep any of the pretty rocks I'd been collecting because we were, duh, in a NATIONAL PARK, so I took a picture of my favorite and then sadly put them all back:

Next stop: Chicago!!!