I want to share a few more details with you about Chicago. In a couple of my previous posts ( here and here) I showed you some glimpses of my last trip there. It turned out to be a really nice visit…great weather, accomplished what we hoped to do, and had some great new experiences along the way.
The first experience…traveling by train:
When we arrived on our first day, we had reservations already lined up to eat at The Mercat a la Planxa…restaurant of Iron Chef, Jose Garces. OK, to be perfectly honest, this didn’t mean a thing to me going into it. Well, eating at a nice restaurant sounded great but Iron Chef? I have no idea who these people are. However, my friend and traveling companion is more of a foodie than I am so having this experience was part of her Chicago Bucket List. How it all transpired is kind of funny. She left the travel arrangements up to me, I left the dining up to her. So back when I was planning where to stay, I decided to just go with Priceline…name your price. I was thrilled to get a 4-Star hotel for only $85.00 a night. After the deed was done, I checked out the hotel’s website and noticed the restaurant there…I forwarded the link to my friend. She emailed me back obviously thrilled about our hotel and the restaurant. It just so happened that Priceline gave us a hotel with an Iron Chef’s restaurant in it. Who knew? Couldn’t have worked out better.
We had a leisurely lunch. I chose to have the Chef’s Special which meant that the cook chose what I was going to eat (but followed my vegetarian diet). It came out course by course:
I think I missed a photo of one of the courses but you get the idea. Overall it was very enjoyable but we would only rate it a 3 out 5 star event.
After dinner we took our bloated selves up to the room to rest:
(our view)
It was a good decision because something we ate hit our stomachs kind of hard so that toilet up there became our buddy. Thankfully it was nothing serious and we were soon on our way for a nice walk:
We walked a good long ways and before we knew it, it was time to think about dinner. I had it in my mind to visit a Jazz Club since this is what Chicago is known for and I have never been to one. We decided on Andy’s Jazz Club:
We had a nice light dinner, listened to a full set of music, enjoyed the ambiance. And since my friend and I have similar energy levels (on par with a sloth addicted to No Doz), we were pretty much done at 8:00. We headed back to the hotel, watched a movie and called it a night. But we were ready to fly the next day.
To be continued…
~~Heather~~
