I'm back!

I made it back from Chicago. I promise to get back to crafty type things next time, with part 2 of my crochet tutorial. But for now, pictures.

Garrick and me at Millennium Park.

The bean!

We went to the Taste of Chicago. Want to see what we ate?

Course 1: Steak sandwiches with Bearnaise sauce. Yummmm.

Course 2: "Deep dish pizza." Yeah, right, more like regular pizza with gross overly sweet and bland sauce. We trashed it.

Course 3: Grilled lobster tail and baked potato. Yummmm.

I liked it lots.

Course 4: Sauteed goat with joloff. That's right, I ate goat. It was very tough. I don't know if it's always like that or if ours was way overcooked.

I was nervous about the goat.

Garrick was excited about it.

Course 5: Tequila lime chicken taco with medium hot sauce. This picture was really blown out, and this was the best I could do with my simple photo enhancing program. I loved this. Garrick thought it was just ok.

Course 6: Grilled anjou pear salad with bleu cheese and walnuts. Sounds great, right? It was AWFUL. I don't know what dressing they put on it, but they drenched it and it was so bright that you couldn't taste anything else. And I think they grilled the pair in the same area they grilled the meat because it tasted like meat seasoning. We trashed it.

Course 7: Oxtail with joloff. Garrick loved this. I thought it just tasted like beef.

In all, we tried to pick the most interesting and I guess sophisticated food we could find. There were a lot of placed selling fried foods or basic foods you could get anywhere, and we figured we didn't want to go there to eat food we could get at home. The one thing I wish we can gotten was an apple and gouda stuffed sausage.

Then we went to Navy Pier, where we saw Cirque Shanghai, went on the ferris wheel, and went on a boat tour around the pier.

Cirque Shanghai

Those are stacked chairs, and she is spinning on one hand on top of all of them. And I don't mean smooth spinning, I mean jerky spinning that made the whole tower waver every time she moved.

The finale included 3 motorcycles driving in a cage. It was much more entertaining than the pictures convey, mostly because not a lot of pictures were taken because we were entranced.

This was when we were on the ferris wheel. If you're not familiar with it, it's 1/4 mile high and takes 6 minutes to get around. I flipped out when we got near the top.

This is near the top. I don't like heights.

This is the ferris wheel. To put things in perspective, you can fit 8 people in each car.

The pier from our boat tour.

The city from Lake Michigan.

The lighthouse.

We also went to Starved Rock, a state park in Ottawa, Illinois.

This is us from the top of Starved Rock. I'd show you pictures of the rock itself, but you can't actually stand on the rock anymore. I don't know why, but now it's just a wooden path. The legend of starved rock goes something like this: There are 2 tribes, and tribe 1 kills Chief Pontiac of tribe 2. Tribe 2 chases tribe 1 onto this rock where they could not fight back. Rather than surrender, they decided to starve to death on the rock. Hence the name Starved Rock.

We thought this dragonfly had been caught in a web and was dead. Turns out it wasn't after we had been messing with it for a couple minutes.

This is at the lodge where we had lunch.

At Eagle Cliff - look! You can see the lock and dam!

We turned "Lovers Leap" into "Lovers Shove." The story of Lovers Leap is that a woman fell in love with a guy who professed his love back, but he had to leave and promised he would be back in 3 months. 3 months came and went, and she found out he was with another tribe and in love with a woman there. So the girl went to Lovers Leap and jumped off, committing suicide. The place where you can look out is, we're pretty sure, not the actual place she jumped from because it would have been more of a "Lovers Tumble" but there's a place really close that is a straight drop into the water.

And we found Bambi, if you look hard toward the middle of the photo you'll see him.

I have tons more photos, but that generally covers it all. I had a lot of fun seeing my grandparents and I wasn't ready to leave, but at the same time it's nice to be home.