Bare Naked Ladies Highlight

We had a wakeup call for 5:30 this morning so we could make it to Chicago at a half decent hour. We had breakfast at the hotel and took off. The car was actually doing really good. We left Minnesota and entered Wisconsin. We did a geocache and then we just had to stop at a cheese place and get cheese. We sampled and ended up buying some cheese curds. This is the freshest cheese you can get. They had just made the batch we purchased that morning. It is slightly squeaky when you chew it due to the whey in the curds. Driving through Illinois was an experience and not a good one. There is no way I could have driven here. Tim did well, but my nerves were still on edge. By the way, I forgot to let you know, our car was hit when we were walking around the town of Keystone at Mt. Rushmore. We had walked around town, and as we were getting into our car, a lady told us somebody from Florida had hit our car. We looked but fortunately could see no damage so all was good. Back to driving to Chicago, we finally made it to our hotel, but the traffic was horrible. Most of our hotels were near the airport because that is where you could get the cheapest hotels. When Tim and Nick were at Chicago last year, they were really impressed with the train system. We checked at our hotel and it turns out the train was just about 1/4 mile walk away. The only problem was, was the walk was across a four lane highway. Luckily there was a walk signal so it worked out well. We went to purchase our tickets and luckily somebody was there to help us. We boarded the train and rode about 40 minutes to downtown. Much better than driving. The traffic looked backed up. Plus the parking alone would have cost more than the roundtrip train tickets. Our mission for downtown Chicago was to get deep dish pizza and then go to the "Taste of Chicago" festival. Tim and Nick had eaten at a Giordano's last time, and that seemed to be the closest for us. We started heading to one on the same street that our train left us off at. We were walking and walking (we all thought it would be relatively close). Then we crossed a street, and there it was. Upon closer inspection though, this restaurant closed at the end of April. I felt like we were in the book, What Good Luck, What Bad Luck. We turned around and hiked it about 10 blocks to another location. All I can say is it was worth it, way worth it. This pizza took about 40 minutes to make for us. It was incredibly delicious. We had ordered a large, and the waitress tried to dissuade us saying it would be too much. We told her we wanted to take some home. After our wait, we were served and ate the best pizza ever. We were easily able to polish this baby off. I'll be having cravings for this pizza in the future. After we were done, we walked down to the lakefront to where they had the festival. This was mostly a food festival, but they had lots of free concerts throughout the day with a special act at night. Tonights was the Bare Naked Ladies. We found a spot and enjoyed the show. This was so much fun to experience with the kids. Nick really liked it. They played this one kids song about Seven "ate" Nine. Way to funny. We then continued to walk the festival. We took pictures by Buckingham Fountain, made famous in the opening credits of Married with Children. We shared a chocalate gelato. Then Tim got adventurous and ordered "Bhel" which was puffed rice and veggies and spices. Not his favorite. He didn't even finish it which is highly unusual for Tim. Cassie and I shared a beignet with raspberry sauce. Then we were done and went back to the train station for our ride back to the hotel. The air in our room wasn't working, and somebody came up to fix it. All in All a very fun day.