Chicago Vacation – Day 1
We decided to stay the night in a hotel near Midway Airport and try and save ourselves a day of rental car fees. So, first thing in the morning, we took a shuttle back to Midway Airport to pickup our rental car. We were offered an upgrade to a Ford Explorer for $10/day and took it. Turns out it was a great idea because we had so much luggage, I’m not sure it would have fit into the car we intended on renting!
After gathering up our luggage and packing our car, we were off to our first destination…The Museum of Science and Industry. Mike and I have fond memories of visiting this museum as a child and couldn’t wait to share it with the kids (Ok, Caden, but I can’t leave Connor out!). We have a Arizona Science Center membership which enabled us to get into the museum for free! We explored the whole museum, but here are some of the highlights!
We headed to the main level first to see the The Great Train Story first. Caden loved jumping from step to step to see the enormous train set. The train set has over 30 trains that are going continuously on 1,400 feet of track. This is a section that hasn’t changed in years and we were glad to see it was the same.
Next, we took a stroll down Yesterday’s Main Street. This street takes you to what Chicago looked like in 1910. The floor is cobblestone, just like the streets were back then. You can look in all the store windows and see what you could have bought back then and for how much. We took some time to visit Finnigan’s Ice Cream Parlor and split a brownie sundae. We were disappointed that the Ice Cream Parlor no longer served ice cream in glass bowls, but it was still a fun experience to re-live.
One of their newest exhibits is Science Storms. Science storms teaches the science behind tornadoes, lightning, fire, tsunamis, sunlight and atoms. This exhibit spanned two floors and had an tornado spinning in the middle of it. It’s definitely geared towards the older child, but Caden still found some of the demonstrations interesting to watch even though he doesn’t understand what they actually are.
One of the biggest changes from the last time we visited, was the moving of the U-505 submarine indoors. We learned that they moved the submarine and then built the building around it! The U-505 submarine is the only WWII German submarine in the United States. You can walk around the submarine and take a tour inside (the inside tour costs extra which we didn’t do.) It’s hard to believe that this thing could float underwater!
We ended our visit around 4pm….just in time to catch Chicago Rush Hour traffic. However, this traffic turned into a blessing in disguise. Due to the traffic, we were running behind on what time we wanted to get to Milwaukee to stay at our friends’ house. As we were driving, a storm was brewing in southern Wisconsin Jen called us just when we got to Gurnee, Illinois and suggested that we stop for dinner to let the storm blow over. We agreed, but the storm caused massive flooding in Milwaukee (including our friends’ basement where we were going to sleep) and multiple tornadoes in Racine, so we decided to stay in Gurnee for the night and hopefully make our way to Milwaukee the next day. That night major storms came through and there were tornado warnings issued for the town a few miles down the road. Once the storm passed, we had a quiet night and got some sleep.
