Chicago Exploring Day 3 by Kenny & Kristen

Sunday in Chicago was race day! We woke up around 5 to finish getting ready and head over to Grant Park in time for the 6:30 start time. Now, if you are familiar with running races, there are a ton of porta-potties around. The important thing to remember is to get there with enough time to use the bathroom before you run. Well I (Kenny) get pretty worked up before races which causes my metabolism to just kick start. SO my priority number 1 was to find those so I didn’t have to go in the middle of the race. We got lucky because there were a ton of them right at the start line. So after about 15 or so minutes of waiting around, we finally headed to our start coral and got ready to run. The race was a good one, the morning air was cool, the day was supposed to be pretty cool and the course was fairly flat.  We got a chance to run all through downtown and see different parts of Chicago and had a great run. We both ran our fastest half marathon times ever and set PR's! After the race we walked over to Buckingham Fountain to relax and enjoy the views.  We also made sure to get our free chocolate milk before heading back to the hotel to cleanup, pack-up, and get ready to go see the town again on an architectural boat cruise! The boat cruise in my opinion was well worth it. The guy spitting out all the information seemed to really know his history of the buildings and really seemed to care a lot about it. It was a great experience, but we got rained on the WHOLE time. We were soaked within a few minutes, but we stuck it out on the top of the boat for the first our. Eventually we (Kristen) gave up and we listened to the last half hour from the bottom covered part. Once we finished up the river tour we headed to the Bloomingdale's store, which we quickly learned was way too fancy store for us. It was very nice though and was 7 or so levels of shopping and food courts. Now came the second most exciting part of the day for us. We had planned to finish off our day with a Chicago deep dish pizza dinner at Gino's East pizza. We had to wait about an hour or so for the pizza, but the wait was well worth it. And boy were those slices filling. We got a small and it was only two slices a piece but it filled us up easy.  The atmosphere was also pretty cool here as they had peoples signatures all over the place. After we finished dinner, we grabbed our thing from the hotel bag check and headed back toward the train station to head back to Schamburg. All in all, I thought Chicago was an awesome place to stay and one of the nicer cities we had stayed in.

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