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Today is our first foray into a major metropolitan area on this trip with a journey into downtown Chicago. We are staying at a Doubletree hotel about 20 miles west of the city as the in town hotel rates were astronomical. The hotel is awesome - thanks again Maureen! - but does not come with a free breakfast so we decided to try the place we saw at dinner last night called the Honey Jam Cafe for breakfast. The breakfast was delicious, but the portions were larger than either of us could eat. So after our hearty breakfast we headed into town. Now we usually avoid Interstates when we're traveling on the bike, but when heading in and out of major metropolitan areas, it's always better to take the interstates if possible. Sure enough, by taking the highways, the Garmin said the trip to town would be only 40 minutes. Of course Garmins don't really anticipate traffic when making this calculation.
The Museum of Science and Industry is located south of downtown Chicago and away from most of the other downtown attractions. It's a fairly large museum and as much as we like science museums, we decided to spend the
entire day there. Since the Museum of Science & Industry opens at 9:30, and the Garmin said it would take 40 minutes, we left at 8:15 hoping to make it reasonably early considering the expected traffic. The traffic was even a little worse than we had expected, but not really unusual as it is Chicago. We arrived at the museum at about 9:40. Not bad timing! We had trouble finding the parking, but soon realized that it was under the building, so we turned into the entrance and headed on down. As we arrived, there was a big sign on the right: No Motorcycles Allowed. I assumed this meant everyone else's motorcycle, but certainly not mine! As I was sitting at the entrance looking at how to get a ticket, some guy came out and told us that motorcycles were just not allowed. When I asked why, he explained that when they went to automated gates, the motorcycles simply did not have enough metal to trigger the automated gates, so they just were not allowed.
After driving the last hour to get and not knowing what to do next, I told the guy we were not from around here
and what did he have in the line of suggestions. He pointed out a couple of spots down the block, one of which had free parking and the other had parking meters. Feeling especially lucky today, we headed over to where he had pointed out the free parking area when we noticed someone just about to pull out. Making a u-turn in the middle of the street, we pulled up right behind the guy who was leaving and pulled right into his vacated space. What luck! A parking space! And even a FREE parking space - the underground parking would have been $22. Life is good.
So we headed over to the museum and tried to decide what exhibits to see. Most of the museum is included in the admission fee, but there are a number of special exhibits that have a scheduled time and an additional fee. The sign out front showed a special Robots exhibit put on by Google which I knew we wanted to see, and I asked the ticket guy for a recommendation and he suggested the German U-boat tour, but he didn't give us tickets for it. We then figured out that for each
of the timed, extra charge tickets, you could buy them at the entrance to the exhibit, so we decided to wait until we had seen all the regular exhibits and the Robots exhibit and if we still had time we could always take and additional special exhibit tour.
Jody and I really love science museums an this one in Chicago is a really good one. There were lots of exhibits and most were very interactive. There were plenty of children visiting, and they really seemed to enjoy the interactive aspects. The Google Robot exhibit was really interesting, with robots playing tic-tac-toe and blackjack - Jody got blackjack on the first hand! But what I really liked was the robot soccer game. There were 4 small wheeled robots - 2 playing offense and 2 playing defense. The offense would take turns setting up and shooting the ball. They would work as a pair to setup and execute shots on goal. The defense robots also worked as a team blocking shots and protecting the goal. The interesting thin is that all 4 were autonomous, only working off the actions of their teammate and their opponents. It was fun to watch, and
to imagine how much code it would take to get these robots to work together.
There were planes, trains and automobiles in the transportation section, lots of biology stuff in the human and animal sections, farm equipment in the farm tech section, and the typical nature and weather, global warming planet concerns, old time streets and movies. Just plenty to see and lots of fun interaction with the exhibits. One of our favorites was the whisper room where the acoustics were set up so you could whisper at one end of the room and hear it loudly at the other. It was amazing! It was getting around 2:00 and we had visited most of the Museum, but we hadn't been down to the German U-boat. So down we went, I'm not sure what I expected, I guess some sort of replica. But it turned out that in the basement of the museum was an actual, real German U-boat, that was the only one captured intact by the US Navy. When the Navy was done with the U-boat, in 1954 it was sold to the museum and evidently sat outside on display for years until about 10 years ago when
it was brought inside, restored, and now guided tours are given of the U-boats interior. The U-Boat tour guide was awesome!
About 3:30 it looked like it was getting about time to head back to the hotel and get ready for dinner. When we stepped outside, we couldn't believe how much the temperature had dropped, it was down to 63 degrees! Again, the Garmin said about 40 minutes, and again, because of traffic we arrived at the hotel a little after 5:00. For dinner, we met up with Jody's cousin Amy and her family who live in the local area. We hadn't seen them in about 9 years. It was really nice to get together, the children have grown so much! Tomorrow, after an entire day with science, will be a day for the arts with a visit to the Chicago Art Institute and whatever other art museums we can get to during the day.
70.8 Miles Today
1832.5 Miles Total
0.0 Gallons Today
42.165 Gallons Total
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