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