Advertisement
Published: August 15th 2013
Edit Blog Post
We crossed the Mississippi river today - our arbitrary marker for delineating the eastern US from the western US. It just feels different, almost instantly - more cars, more people, more buildings, more...everything. Goodbye wide open spaces. Goodbye starry skies. Goodbye quiet nights, campfires, mountain overlooks and wildlife. We are almost home.
Uncle Brian showed off his parenting skills by having all the kids up, dressed and fed and our load of laundry (due to an unexpected shampoo spill in our overnight bag) folded by the time we arrived at 7:10 am. After saying our farewells, we took off for Chicago's Wrigley Field, racing the clock to make a 1:20 pm game (not 2:00 as we originally thought). We almost made it, but of course got waylaid once we arrived in decking everyone out in Cubs t-shirts on our way into the ballpark.
As luck would have it, it was a fast-paced game, too. By the time we took our seats, it was already the 4th inning. And our streak of not helping the home team stands firm, as we watched the Cubs fold to the Reds 5 - 0. Oh well - it's (another) rebuilding year for our
beloved cubbies.
The kids' reaction to the field was...interesting. You have to understand, Todd has dreamt (literally) of the day he would get to take all of his kids to this baseball mecca, sharing the history, the beauty, the fundamental
aura that is Wrigley Field. Perhaps we should have started here, though, before exposing them to so many other parks. They were dumbfounded by how "small" everything in the stadium is - the aisles, the stores, the concourse, the scoreboard, the field itself. They kept wanting to know why anyone would have built it this way, and didn't seem to understand why the surrounding buildings had not just been torn down to increase the size of the stadium.
But for the 8th inning we moved down to seats just beyond the 1st base, and they were pleasantly surprised with just how close to the field they could sit in the friendly confines of Wrigley Field. But proximity only wins so many brownie points with this crowd - I think if they were in charge, the "improvements" they would approve might result in Todd's first (and potentially last) coronary.
The game ended quickly, and we killed some time
just walking around before climbing back into our van and heading out of town via Lakeshore Drive. We're taking the northern route home, as the GPS assures us that it's at least an hour shorter this way. So here we find ourselves, just off of I-80 in South Bend, IN, home of Notre Dame, the home state of our current nanny, Chloe, and finally back in the Eastern Time Zone after 27 days having been out of it. We enjoyed our "last" road trip dinner at Steak & Shake, one of my childhood favorites, where Maggie & Billy adorned themselves with a beard and mustache that, at least on Billy, look startlingly appropriate. A mere 10 hours stand between us and our homefront, at which we will arrive sometime tomorrow evening. No one seems to be in a big rush, though, and the hotel pool may beckon one last time in the morning.
For now, we'll just enjoy our last night away from home, basking in the fun of hotel living and uninterrupted, undistracted family time together, before real life assaults us once more in 24 hours. It certainly was fun while it lasted!
Marcia
Advertisement
Tot: 0.122s; Tpl: 0.011s; cc: 11; qc: 53; dbt: 0.0523s; 1; m:domysql w:travelblog (10.17.0.13); sld: 1;
; mem: 1.1mb