Day Twenty-Four

This morning we tried to get organised and decide how we were going to spend the rest of our time here. 

On the agenda for today was a tour of The Rookery and a trip to the Field Museum.  First stop though was breakfast at Tempo, recommended by the friendly and helpful Dwayne.  We both ordered an omelette (3 eggs) that came with three fillings plus a side of hash browns and two thick slices of toast.  I couldn’t finish my omelette and didn’t touch the toast, and apart from snacking occasionally on popcorn, have not needed anything else to eat the whole day.  No such thing as a small serve here.

With stomachs bulging, we set off and second stop was to buy a three day pass for the train system.  This was pretty fascinating to us banking geeks, because you have to pay $5 to buy a Ventra card, and then you load money on it.  The card is like an ATM card, technically a MasterCard branded debit card, no chip but contactless.  So you tap it on the turnstyle and it lets you through.  We braved our first subway, which was the usual low ceilinged narrow platformed subway similar to New York, though not quite as hot and crowded.  Then we changed to an L train to get to The Rookery.  Wow, the L is antiquated.  You would think you had gone back in time to the 70’s.  Narrow wooden platforms, I have no idea how it copes with a big volume of people in rush hour, narrow stairs up and down, plus all the infrastructure looks rusted and rickety.  You will remember this is the elevated train line that runs above ground, with cars underneath.  As trains come and go from the station, the whole platform sways back and forth, plus you can see right through the train line to the road below.  Unexpected in such a busy city, and I would say long overdue for an upgrade.

We had booked a midday tour of the rookery, which is a building here in Downtown Chicago that was built in 1888.  At the time, it was one of the first high-rises (11 stories) built after the Great Chicago fire of 1871 and used very advanced techniques for the day.  The skylight lobby was redecorated by Frank Lloyd Wright in 1905.  It’s a very impressive building and while there are FLW influences, he didn’t overwhelm an already fabulous building with his own ideas, but managed to enhance a few things.  The tour felt a quite rushed on the bits we were most interested in, which was the inside, and particularly the staircase.  Only half an hour long, we spent the first 10 minutes getting the history, then went outside to a cacophony of sirens and nearby construction work, which we could easily have covered off on our own time, before heading back inside to the good bits.  You can’t access the stairwell, which is the most picturesque and most photographed stairwell in all of Chicago, unless you belong in the building or are on a tour, and that part was over in about 5 minutes flat, or so it seemed.  But I did manage to get some pix, though they are far from good, more by good luck than good skills. It was quite impressive, and I would have liked to have had much longer to oh and ah over it.  But she gave us a good tip about the Trade building, which she said had a fabulous art deco lobby, so we headed over there once the tour was over, and wow, did it have a fabulous art deco lobby.    Probably one of the most lovely examples I’ve seen in the flesh. 

Once we were done there, we headed for the subway again with the target being the Field Museum, but we interrupted the trip to stop at Garrett’s Popcorn Shop.   This was recommended to us by the Avis woman when we picked up the car all the way back in Buffalo, and she was spot on.  We bought a small caramel pecan, and a small caramel, which of course left us with enough popcorn to feed a small army.  It is VERY good and rather more-ish.

The Field Museum has the largest most complete t-rex ever discovered, which was pretty impressive, and also a pretty good Egyptian section.  We spent a couple of hours there wandering the exhibits, including the Lions of Tsavo, man-eating lions that ate about 135 railway construction workers building a railway bridge over the Tsavo River in Kenya, until they were eventually shot and killed by the project leader.  He later sold their skins to the Chicago museum for $5000, and they were eventually turned into the exhibit we saw today.

By now it was about 4 o’clock and I was ready to head home via a boot shop I had spotted late in the day yesterday, and J stopped at a Barnes and Noble he had earmarked by one of our train stops.   J was much more successful than me and arrived home a very happy camper with a book of artwork by the guy who now does all the Airfix boxtop art.  Heavy, but he has to carry it :-)

A bit colder today, even though it was fine.  A perishingly cold wind, that like Wellington, affected some pockets of the city worse than others.  Still wearing a t-shirt and polar fleece though and plenty warm, even in the cold wind.

Tomorrow the weather forecast is good and we are planning a river Architecture cruise, and possibly a visit to the Wills Tower, formerly the Sears tower, which is the tallest building in Chicago. 

I’ve booked a three hour tour for Thursday morning of Frank Lloyd Wright’s house, studio, plus a tour of Oak Park suburb, which contains quite a number of buildings designed by him.  Looking forward to that, better make sure I have fully charged batteries. 

The elevated train structure , it's called the "L"

Detail from the Rookery

The Rookery interior

Vertical shot of the Rookery staircase

exterior shot of the Rookery building

and just a few yards down the road, another stunning example of art deco architecture

Sue - the T-rex

Sue's actual skull, too heavy to sit on the skeleton, so they display it separately

General view of the Chicago skyline from the steps of the field museum

Day Twenty-Three

Bean Day

We put our walking shoes on today, with the goal of getting to know the city a bit.  We left our hotel and walked down to the local Bank of America ATM to get some cash (Using Bank of America so we don’t pay the @#$%^& $8 fee that our dear bank would usually charge for such a cost-less transaction) and have breakfast.   

That accomplished, we walked over to Navy Pier, with a view to walking round Lake Side Drive and eventually to the Millennium Park.  This is where they have The Bean (actually I think it’s correctly called The Cloud, but Bean is pretty appropriate) which is simply a big stainless steel sculpture in the shape of a bean.  Being stainless steel, it’s very reflective, so hours of fun can be had with reflections.  Hard to describe, you will have to look at the photos.  It’s pretty cool and we spent almost an hour and a half here, watching people having fun with it, taking photos, and having some fun ourselves.  It really is fun, very cool.Indeed all photo's below are of the Bean ! 

Chicago is a wee bit like New York, there is lots of stunning architecture here, and a good mix of new buildings as well, some that sit side by side with the old and it all seems to work pretty well.  Plus they have the L, an elevated train system that runs above road level.

For dinner, we mooched up Rush Street and found a place called Big Bowl, which served Thai food and looked pretty good.  The food was excellent, but once again, really big portions and we came out of there with our stomachs like little (ok, BIG!) barrels.

Day Twenty-two

Day Twenty Two

This morning we were treated to a MASSIVE and yummy breakfast by our hosts Steve and Nancy, who ran the Heavenly Habitat Bed & Breakfast.  Ham steaks, brown sugar sausages (yep, the Americans put sugar in EVERYTHING, but these were actually quite nice), poached eggs (nice to get REAL eggs and not re-constituted and made into omelettes like they serve at the motels) and a baked French toast with peaches.  Which turned out to be a bit like a bread and butter pudding with peaches on top, and it was delicious.  We spent longer than we intended chatting to Steve and Nancy, they were a lovely couple.  From Texas originally and moved to Winterset to be closer to Nancy’s sister & her husband who live in Des Moines.  Steve is semi retired due to health issues, he is a BIG guy, and has a pacemaker as he had an irregular heart beat.  He used to work for Texas Instruments, following blue prints to machine stuff for the military, night scopes and such like, but is unable to work in the field any more due to the high energy environment.  He runs the B & B and they have some kind of retail store they run from the building.  They bought the church when they moved to Des Moines, it had been on the market for a couple of years so was going for a good price.  The congregation had outgrown it and built a larger church elsewhere in the town.  It is basically in two parts, the church itself, which Steve and Nancy converted into their living quarters, and the attached “church hall” which is now a separate guests quarters.  It has two bedrooms each with ensuite and we also had the kitchen dining and living area at our disposal too.  A pretty good setup all round really.  They are really busy in the summer months, fully booked for weeks on end, but winter not so much.  We were the only guests the night we stayed.  So after much chat and swapping of stories, we eventually hit the road just before 10am, a late start for us.  We had another visit to the Holliwell Bridge, and were fortunate to have the place to ourselves this time.  It was another lovely sunny day and we spent a few minutes enjoying the place and snapping pictures.  Then we decided to go and look for Francesca’s house from the movie, it was marked on the local map we had, but also noted as “CLOSED” so we weren’t sure if it would be signposted or if we could even find it.  But it was on the way to Des Moines so we thought we’d give it a crack.   And we got lucky, the map was actually pretty accurate, and by the time we got close enough I was able to recognise it anyway.  Plus the huge “Trespassers will be prosecuted” signs were a bit of a giveway J.  Pretty cool to see it, even though it looks a  bit different without the gardens out front, plus we were quite a long way away at the end of the driveway from it.  After that we hit the road for Chicago, as we knew had about a six hour drive and the car needed to be dropped off by 6.30pm.  We had an uneventful trip, though made a bad decision to exit for a food stop that ended up taking us miles from the Interstate and after all that effort, the options to buy food were dismal.  We chugged down a bad hotdog each and hit the road again.  Of course, we got back onto the Interstate, and the very next sop had a bunch of food outlets right off the highway.  Sigh.  The reason I mention the detour to get food is that we had opted to pay an upfront fee so we could return the car empty.  We figured at the last fill, we would have about the right amount to get us to Chicago without having to stop again.  Of course, the detour for the food stop probably chewed up about 16miles, and the petrol warning light came on with about 30 miles to go to our destination.  Then we got stuck in a bit of a traffic jam, presumably everyone coming home after the weekend away, so we were stop/start for a while, and then crawling for a while longer, getting more and more anxious about our dwindling fuel supply.  My theory was we probably had about 50 miles left when the warning light came on, there’s no point warning you that you’re getting low on fuel and then only giving you 5 miles to find a gas station right ?  The drive into Chicago was pretty simple.  We’d chosen to drop in right in downtown area, so it then wasn’t far to schlep luggage to our hotel.  The Interstate and then a couple of express ways took us almost all the way to our destination, with only a few streets to be negotiated once we got off the final major road.  All went ok, except due to roadworks we couldn’t turn left into one of the required streets, so that ended up costing us another lap of the block in fuel to get us back on track.  Then Dora was telling us to turn right down what looked like a tiny alleyway, which J almost overshot because it looked like a driveway not a street, but Dora was bang on target, because at the end of the alley, there was the Avis return stop.  Down a very narrow tightly curving driveway into the bowels of a parking building.  One of the guys that was hanging about there offered to drop us at our hotel.  For a tip of course, which was money for nothing for him given he used an avis rental car to do it, but it saved us having to schlep luggage up to the street and worked out well for both of us.

We are staying at the Talbott Inn, which was one of the cheapest options we could find in the Downtown area and came with excellent reviews on Tripadvisor.  It has not disappointed so far, we have an enormous room and it’s is really pretty and well appointed.  We even had a sofa and a couple of arm chairs.  Ideally situated too, the hours of research does pay off.  There’s a guy called Dwayne, and we are struggling to give a name to his role.  He’s out the front at the hotel when you arrive, and he escorted us to our room last night with our bags and then spent about five minutes giving us some great local tips.  Not really a bell boy, more like a concierge.  It’s funny, we are pretty independent and it’s quite hard for us to let someone else schlep our bags and “help”, but they seem so keen to do it, and almost offended when we pick up bags ourselves, as if we are taking their job from them, which I suppose we are.  Hard to get used to.  He recommended a great pizza joint that we went to last night, that was heaving even on a Sunday night and we waited almost an hour for a table.  Pizza was pretty darn good though !  Chicago is famous for Deep pan Pizza, which is actually a thin crust pizza with a tonne of filling making it “deep”.  Scrummo.  We are a skip away from Michigan Avenue, which is known as the Magnificent Mile, named so in the 1940’s because of the range of prestigious shops that populate it.  It’s still the same now, all the big names, Ralph Lauren, Saks Fifth Avenue, Nordstrom, Banana Republic, Gucci, Prada, Cartier etc etc.   All stuff that sounds posh but you can never afford to buy J.  This is what I was expecting in New York’s Fifth Avenue, but didn’t happen.  Maybe I just didn’t walk for long enough.  Time to hit the hay and prepare for a new day tomorrow.

Francesca's House

It took several goes to try & figure out why the fuel wasn't pumping (and a couple of visits to the attendant!) . Turns out there's this little black , unlabbeled , handle that needs to be pushed up.

Road into Chicago

General buildings view

Two unique buildings - the lower section is car parking

trump Tower

Day Twenty One

Bridges of Madison County day

We had a quiet and uneventful night at Galesburg, a very average breakfast put on by the hotel and hit the road about 8:15am.  The area was covered in pretty heavy fog, it was like pea soup (where did that expression come from, it’s neither green nor pea-shaped ?) for the first half an hour’s drive, but fortunately it burnt off pretty quickly and by 9am it was plain sailing.  No issues with the four hour drive to Winterset, however after a quick exit to top-up with petrol and use the loo, Dora did send us on a circuitous route back to the motorway, which she then seemed quite embarrassed about, and was pretty quiet for the rest of the trip.  We arrived in Winterset just after midday, and headed straight for the North Side café for lunch.  This is the café that was used for filming during the movie The Bridges of Madison County.  Clint Eastwood apparently parked himself on the forth stool from the doorway when he met Lucy Redfern by chance at the diner.  If you’ve never watched the movie you will have no idea what I’m talking about.  But that does not matter, what matters is the make an awesome range of pies.  J had Peanut Butter pie, and I had Pumpkin Cheesecake, topped with sugared pecans.  Both were delicious and not at all necessary for our already round tums, but we ate them anyway.  We waddled out of the café and decided to find some accommodation for the night.  The only motel in town, the Super 8 was fully booked, so we tried plan B which was a local B&B.  Heavenly Habitat was first on the list, so named because it is a converted church.  It’s a lovely little place filled with very nice furniture etc.  Accommodation sorted, we headed off to the first of the bridges in the area, the Holliwell bridge.  Alas there was a wedding in progress at the time, and the bride & bride and assembled guests were crowded at one end of the bridge and we couldn’t get a decent look in.  We drove around to the other end, but that wasn’t much good either.  We did meet a nice couple from Des Moines, who had lived there for many years and were on their very first visit to the bridges.  Des Moines is the nearest big city, only an hour’s drive away.  They told us it was unusually warm for this time of year (we were just wearing t-shirts, no long sleeves or outer tops required), and they often get snow settled on the ground from mid-November that lasts right through to the end of March.  By the way, the bridge is actually no longer in use, it has been replaced with a new roadway and modern bridge, so they are not used except as a tourist attraction, and sometimes wedding venue.  Roseman Bridge was next on the list, similarly this is no longer in use and has been replaced with a modern bridge.  We had better luck this time, no weddings in progress and while there were about a dozen other sight-seers like us, we did manage to get photos without other people cluttering them up.  Cedar Bridge was next, this one can still be driven over but that’s because it was burnt down by an arsonist back in 2002 and has been re-built.  Same style and methods used, but you can tell all the wood is new.  Of course, all of the bridges have had graffiti added, mostly of the “Barbie loves Ken 1978” variety, and given it was a reproduction bridge rather than an original, and that we had travelled such a long way to see it, J decided he would add an inscription from us.  Which sounded like a great idea, until he dropped my pen and it fell through the wooden trusses on the side of the bridge onto the ground below.  Much hilarity ensued as he climbed under the bridge to retrieve it.  Unbelievable, he did actually find it again, and the inscription was completed.

Next bridge on the list was Hogback bridge.  Not one of the ones used during the filming, but I’d overheard someone say it was worth a visit, so off we went.  It was pretty spectacular, and nicely reflected in the stream flowing underneath it.  All of these bridges had a tonne of flies swarming everywhere (we’re in farming country now) and tiny black bitey bugs that were having a good old feast on my arms.  I expected to end up covered in itchy welts, but so far so good, no reaction to them.  Maybe they just had really tickly feet, with no after-effects.   By now it was about 5 o’clock, so we decided to head home and get changed to go out and find something to eat.  Not much on offer in the tiny town, so we ended up back at the North Side café for dinner as well.  At least they serve real food, we both had salads for dinner, washed down with a slice each of the super pumpkin cheesecake.  Too delicious to resist.  I think I’ve mentioned this before, but halloween makes much more sense here.  In NZ, it seems a bit odd, like an excuse to bludge sweets off the neighbours, but here, it’s a whole big thing with weeks of build-up and decorations, and it’s as much about the change of season as anything else.  And part of the season are pumpkins, and pumpkins make delicious treats when baked into things like cheesecake.  I also had a scrummo pumpkin roll at Fallingwater, it was like a swiss roll filled with a cream cheese type mixture to stick it all together.  Seriously good.

Iowa is crop country, and today we passed field after field of corn.  The land is mostly pretty flat, sometimes gently rolling, so it’s quite different from the tree-clad hills we saw in Pennsylvania.  And we are at the end of the autumn colours here, lots of the trees are bare already, and those still with leaves are mostly dark yellow or brown about to fall off.  Lots of wide open spaces for crops and then a cluster of buildings.  House, barn, equipment sheds, plus silos, presumably for storing the corn.  Quite a few of the local roads that we took to see the bridges are all unsealed, so it makes sense that almost everyone drives a big chevvie or GMC truck.  The town of Winterset feels very small and very rural, and it isn’t a stretch to imagine it being the mid 60’s when the movie was set.  It’s been good to see a small slice of American farming life.  And the bridges are more interesting and picturesque than I imagined they would be, so it was definitely worth the long haul to get here J

Inside the bridge showing the timber construction

A common sight here in Iowa