Chicagoland!

Josh invited me to Chicago when he went on his latest trip for work. I was more than happy to take him up on his offer! I left the kids (the girls went to Aunt Betsy's house and had a blast and Baby Liev stayed with Grammie and loved it) and headed to Chicagoland for a few days with Josh. He was still working when I got there so I took the shuttle to the hotel and hung out until he was done for the day.

Our good friends live downtown and I was lucky enough to spend one day with sweet Heidi and her kids. They live right downtown along the Chicago River. She showed me around town and I have to say I was proud of us for how much we got done and saw in one day. We walked a lot but we had fun!

This is just down from their house along the river.
The famous Bean. Oscar and I posing in front of it (along with hundreds of others.)

This fun fountain that I could tell the boys were just wanting to jump into.

Josh took me to a White Sox game. We had a great time and mostly loved the people watching. Our favorite guy? The beer vendor who growled instead of talked. "Beeeeeeeer. Got your beeeeeeer." Seriously growling.

In typical fashion, we left early because we were tired and the Sox were losing anyway. Watching ESPN later we found out that we missed a good game - some sort of drama right after we left that put the game into a bunch of extra innings and Sox ended up winning. Nice.

The Taste of Chicago was in town while I was in town. We took the Ainges with us and had a great time and some great food.

There was a crowd of people and we just joined right in. How it works: Buy tickets. Tell the booths if you want a full portion or a "taste" portion of their food. Eat a lot. Enjoy.

And we did enjoy. We ate about $50 worth of food and enjoyed all of it. The best? Either the meat from Texas de Brasil or the crab wontons from some asian booth. I did have a Chicago dog and Chicago pizza too - of course.

Unfortunately my camera broke just as we were leaving the park, so we borrowed Heidi's camera for the rest of our trip.

Josh and I took a boat tour of the city on the Chicago River one afternoon. It was an architectural tour and came highly recommended.

We really loved it and had fun learning about the great city of Chicago and its architecture. Our guide was awesome and even talked about the upcoming "Transformers" movie that was filmed in Chicago and showed us which buildings were destroyed in the movie. He was right.

We strolled around downtown for a while and did some shopping. Funny - you'd think we would find a place to shop that we don't have in Utah, but we ended up in the Gap and couldn't get outta there.

The weather while I was there was perfect. Not too hot and cloudy - around 75 degrees and perfect.

Enjoying our last night in town. Just down from Tanner and Heidi's house along the river again. It was beautiful!

Thanks to:

Josh for taking me along on his "work" trip and showing me is home away from home.

Tanner and Heidi for letting us hang out and crash at their house one night. Great times and great conversation - they are such good friends!

Aunt Betsy and family for watching the girls who had more fun there than they could have possibly had with us.

Grammie and Aunt Hayley for taking Baby Liev for a few days. (Mom had him then had to fly to California to be with her dad for an emergency surgery so she passed Liev off to Hayley and Caleb.)

We got home Sunday night and started a new week the next day. We were tired but had a great trip together!