Day Twenty Five

Last day in Chicago.  I had booked an In depth Frank Lloyd Wright tour, which included a tour of his home and studio in Oak Park, one of the outer suburbs of Chicago, plus a walk through the local neighbourhood to view several of his home creations plus a tour of Unity Temple.

I caught the train and arrived in time for the 9.15am tour.  Despite my careful planning, I managed to foul up where I changed trains so I ended up re-covering ground and then getting stuck waiting for a signal fault to be repaired.  But I had time to scoff my nutella and banana croissant and bucket of coffee.  I was the only one on the tour, so it was pretty good to have the guide to myself and be able to take my time and ask whatever questions I wanted.  Really hard to take photos, so I bought a book instead, the professionals were able to do a much better job than me.

The house tour was pretty cool, there were some stunning rooms and use of light etc, and his studio was fabulous.  Hexagonal in shape and with everything, including the shape of the table legs, designed with thought for how the room would feel over all.

The walk through the neighbourhood included some fabulous houses, which typically sell for a few hundred thousand over and above market rate simply because they were designed by FLW.  One family is restoring the house one room at a time, so that they can save enough money to do it right.  Last room on the list for them is the kitchen, so I don’t envy them that job !  It will be quite hard to end up with a usable modern kitchen that still fits with his design ethic.

Then it was time for the Unity Temple.  FLW insisted that it be called a temple, even though technically it is a church.  The look of it, especially from the outside, is nothing at all like you expect from a church, so he wants to shift your expectations before you even see it.  It seems he was a man with quite a forceful personality, and a pretty big ego to boot.  The Unity Temple is best described as a monolithic block of concrete from the outside.  He designed it soon after he returned from working in Japan, and the influence is pretty clear to see, I’ll let the photos tell the story.  You would think form looking at it from the outside that it would be very dark inside, as there are only windows high up, plus one strip of windows to light the four stairwells, one in each corner.  They let in a surprising amount of light, plus the ceiling is basically made of skylights.  One of the requirements was that the road noise outside be kept outside, and he did manage to achieve that pretty well.  There are a few quirky design features, as usual, you don’t just walk into the temple, you are taken on a roundabout trip up a single stairwell, and then the room opens out in front of you.  One of the tricks he often used, take you through a small and often dark space and then have the room open out in front of you to give the impact of being in a big open space.  The main part of the temple was stunning, light and open, and beautifully decorated in his style.  Took my breath away, and I was so glad I had been able to see it in the flesh.

So with the tour over, I headed back into town to meet up with J who had been on his own adventure to a hoby shop far far away.  Over to Joe……

So today was our last day, and the previous night we’d repacked & sorted everything to make sure we could be ready to depart Chicago to catch our Denver flight. However as that wasn’t until late afternoon we still had several hours to kill, so while Deb did the FLW tour , I decided to pick a hobby shop and go check it out.

The one I chose was ‘Forever Timeless’ Hobby shop ways out in West Belmont Ave. I checked out the directions and it seemed fairly straight forward to get there - a Red Line bus to Belmont station ( north) , then catch a #77 bus and get off at  the appropriate stop.  The Chicago metro site has a really  useful trip planner function where you can enter a start and destination address, then it will display all that you need to do to get there , even which direction to walk in when needed.

The trip out took about 35 minutes , most of it on the bus. The buses are pretty good as when stops are coming up , they're displayed and read out automatically, so no chance of missing your stop. The shop was in a fairly industrial area and judging by the changes in signage from English to Spanish , home to a large Spanish-American population.

We’ve noticed in Chicago that the homeless tend to be a bit more direct when asking for money and this area was not different, as on my trip , I saw that homeless people would walk down lines of cars at the intersection waving their placards and begging for money.

Eventually I got to my stop and jumped o9ff, but the shop wasn’t due to open until 11am and I was there at 10;30, so had a 1/2 hour to wait. I decided to head off in search of some breakfast , but after 10 minutes walking further west , there was nothing to be seen ! I remembered passing a macca’s on the bus so retraced my steps and heading back in the other direction, so after another 20 minutes I finally found the place, had a coffee and wrap and then headed back to the hobby shop.

Well wouldn’t you know it, 11:10am and the place wasn’t open. Hmm I decided to keep hanging around and try my luck - there was no shop window to speak of, just small glass bricks , so I had no view inside to see if anyone was there , and the door was covered by a metal roller-door.

I was on the verge of giving up at 11:45 and was walking , dejectedly, back to the bus stop when , joy, the roller-door came up and the door opened , woo-hoo! I was greeted by a young african-american lady who explained that while she could see my trying to peek in, she’d had problems opening the roller door.

The shop had a narrow entrance that opened out to a large cavernous section, and it was jammed packed with kits, plastic and die casts ! What a great hobby shop! They had a very extensive selection of car models, these being the bulk of their stock , but I had a very happy time rummaging in the aircraft section. With one eye on the time ( buses every 15 mins, and a 1/2 hour trip back to the hotel) , I eventually settled on a couple of gems and made my way back. The bus trip back to the train station was pretty busy as I guess most people were heading into town to do shopping , so I had to stand most of the time. However we made good time and I was back in Chicago , ready for the next stage. Happily my kits fitted into my back pack, so no need to do any re-organisation !

and back to Deb …..

We had a bite of lunch and then mooched back to the bean, it’s a pretty fun way to pass the time watching everyone having fun with it, taking photos etc.  Seems we timed our trip right, the weather was MUCH colder today and snow showers are forecast for Friday.  Then it was time to schlep all our luggage to the airport, which involved hauling it a few blocks, wrestling a backpack each, plus the wheely expandable suitcase for overflow, plus our carry on bags etc.  Down the stairs into the subway, back up again to change lines to the L and the orange line out to Midway.  Then the six mile trek from the train terminal to the actual airline terminal to check in.  we were both a lather of sweat by the time we arrived at Southwest checkin, so had to head to the loos and shed the polar fleece layer that we had needed outside.  When will we learn to travel light ???

Duly checked in, we joined what seemed like thousands of people at Midway on a Thursday night, and had a drink and plate of chips at the bar near our departure gate, and then it was time to board.  Southwest have an unusual boarding process, which thankfully craig had prewarned us about else we would have had no clue.  You are not allocated a seat, instead you check in online and are allocated a boarding position, which contains a group and a number.  Then they call group A to line up, and they have poles with the boarding number printed on it e.g. one pole for positions 1-5 on one side and 31-35 on the other side,  and you are supposed to line up in two lines, one on each side of the pole, in the number order of your boarding position.  Once group A has boarded, Group B lines up.  We had been give group C14 and 15. So you are getting the picture, the further down you are in the pecking order, the less chance there is of sitting together, and you mostly end up getting stuck with the middle seat.  Also everyone else who has already boarded before you has hogged all the overhead locker space with their gigantic carry on monstrosities, so if you are particularly unlucky, you can end up having to check your carry on.  We are fortunate enough to get two seats together, at the very last row of the plane, and found space in the lockers further up the plane to put our comparatively tiny bags.  Coffee and tea and soft drinks are free, plus you get flung a miniature bag of peanuts and snacks for the trip.  You can buy wine if you wish, and they come through the cabin with an ordering pad with a credit card machine attached to the back, and take your order like a waitress, and if you are ordering something that’s not free, swipe your card to pay for it (no pin or signature required, they  are all low value txns.)  Then they come back with everyone’s order on a tray and dish them out.  It’s all pretty casual, the staff are polite but quite informal.  We also found out via Craig that the airline has the cabin crew clean the plane, no separate cleaning staff, so they get a bit obsessive about coming through and collecting the trash.  The result of all this is efficiency, and for both flights so far we have left early and arrived early.  Apparently this is common, and they are so reliably early that Craig knew he had to get there early to meet us.  So it was an uneventful  flight, and we did indeed land early.  The terminal at Denver is so big you catch a train to the baggage claim area, and Craig was there to meet us and thankfully help us haul the luggage to his truck.  We had arrived in Denver J