Dinosaur BBQ

Went to Dinosaur BBQ in Newark, the Angie has wanted to go for over a year now - but we got there too late when going to Devil's games and they weren't taking anymore names :(  So we went, this time with Curt.  As always great food - but they were out of the fried green tomatoes... sigh.  I had catfish over collards, mac n cheese and red beans and rice ( sub black eyed peas for the red beans and you have my favorite new years day dinner)

Supposed to publish on Jan 5 

Went to a Devil's open practice

It was both interesting and fun!  And crowded - a lot of people were there ( they only opened up one side of the seats)  AS always NJ (the mascot) was the hardest working guy there!

This was supposed to be the Jan 4th post

More Chicago pictures! (meant for Sunday- oops)

Here are some more of the general sightseeing pictures from Chicago.  Enjoy!

I think Rock Bottom Brewery is an awesome name for a bar!!

The beach at night!  Was waiting for the kraken!

The Orange Cone's cousin from Chernobyl??

(NASCAR fans on Twitter will understand the reference)

The answer is no.

As much as I love grits, MacDonald's is not where I'm getting mine.

Of course MacDonald's is never the answer to Ria's hungry.

Subway mural

Sights of Chicago (should have posted Saturday - screwed up the schedule button)

I have some pictures I want to share, but none of them are really full post material, so just some quick captions.

On our first day, while wandering around waiting to check in, we found the Millennium Fountain for Curt (sigh I married someone who likes the show Married With Children.. sigh)

 Skyline from the fountain

Grew up hearing about Route 66

The Public Library near the Loop.

We stayed in the white building just to the right.

Our window looked out at the library just where the brick turns to copper and glass

There were several of these heads across from one of the Starbucks I kept walking in...and walking out with coffee...

If you look very carefully at the fountain tower on the left you can see that faces get projected on the tiles, some move, some don't and then there is a new face. It looked really cool at night, but we were driving past in an Uber at the time so no pictures of the night view. (Yup the Angie)

Another head (and the Angie) did the Easter Islanders all move to Chicago?

The Bean

Shot from under The Bean

The Burberry building is faced to match it's new bags!

Water Station

View from Museum Campus across the Harbour.  Museum campus sticks out a bit into the lake.

Wow!  This is a long post!  More later!

 

Weber's Grill Restaurant- should have posted Fri..screwed up the schedule thing

I've been dying to go to a Weber's restaurant ever since I saw them on a show (probably Food Network- don't remember) there was one relatively close to where we were wandering that Friday night, so we went for dinner.  There is an open kitchen when you walk through ( I wish I was sitting at one of the booths opposite where the waitstaff pick up orders so I could watch, but it may have gotten hectic ( I will tell you this - they have some kind of amazing exhaust ventilation system - you can smell the food grilling, but there isn't an smoke floating around)  I didn't take a picture but I glommed one off the net - there is a whole long line of grills that were maybe 4' in diameter!

I was surprised, because as much as I love grilled and bbq'd flesh, there is a certain expectation of a restaurant that specializes in this style of cooking.  Weber's was not that style.  They had really professional waitstaff, and it was really like eating at a very nice restaurant, that happened to specialize in feeding it's patrons grilled flesh.

The food and portions however were exactly what you expect!  The food was really, really, really good.  Couldn't finish half of what was on my plate though, and even though we were staying at a place with a full kitchen, I didn't take my leftovers because A. I would have to carry them around the rest of the night and B. I  knew we wouldn't be there to ever eat the leftovers and we'd toss them when we left anyway.

Adler Planetarium - also on the GoCard

If you ever get the chance to visit Chicago - make sure you check out the Adler Planetarium. They had an eclipse viewing party the night of the lunar eclipse.  They have a lakefront scaled Solar System- the sun is outside the planetarium, the inner solar system is along the lakefront  on Museum campus (where the planetarium, aquarium and natural history museum are located) then north or south along the lake shore the our planets have markers.

Outside there is a statue of Copernicus , facing him are a series of heads on pikes (amused me) of the constellations of the Chinese zodiac.  I got my picture with the horse - clearly the coolest!

 
Around the dome of the building (which part is inside part outside) are the Western zodiac constellations... clearly I had to take scorpius

They had a great collection of antique telescopes, how cute is the Mars Rover??

The Angie and I on an infrared viewer

They have something called an Atwood sphere.  Very cool - it shows the night sky in 1913, via 692 holes drilled in the surface that the light from the top shines through.  Brighter stars have bigger holes so appear brighter (sadly you can no longer see most of the stars for real in actual Chicago at night because of light pollution )  The sphere spins, so  you see an entire year of the night sky.  The guides have a light projector that superimposes the constellations etc onto the sphere.  There is a sled, that held maybe 10? people plus the guide that rides up into the sphere!!  Seriously cool!

 
 
 We got to the planetarium late in the afternoon, and missed the Destination Solar System Show, but we did manage to catch the Skywatch Live show.
 

More go Card Fun!!

We went to the Art Institute of Chicago, and discovered that my friends that run demolition derby cars should be painting the wreckage not scrapping it  - they could be artists!!

The Art Institute did have some cool things - like ancient weapons and armor.

There is a tradition/running joke in our family that every vacation we go on we manage somehow to find a cannon and take the Angie's picture in front of it (when she went on a cruise last summer she saw a cannon on one of the islands they stopped at and had her picture taken in front of that one too!)

We found painted "photo bombs" from the 17th century - the artist would paint his benefactor into the corner of the painting - and non too subtle - truly a photo bomb!

I did my own series of pictures of painters.... here are a couple... it amused me, I didn't want to dampen the Angie's fun.

The Natural History Museum was also on the GoCard

What really fascinated me though, was this giant rock in a tiny tree:

We also hit the Shedd Aquarium,  I guess I'm spoiled having been to some amazing aquariums in other cities, and while this one can't even come close to Baltimore - it was a fun place - and I learned from a biologist's standpoint - frogs and toads are the same animal...

Yes, there is still more stuff we did off of the GoCard - so another post tomorrow!

Go Card chicago

Smart Destinations have Go Cards for a lot of major cities.  We bought the all inclusive 5 day pass.  There are smaller packages - but really the pass covered almost everything we wanted to see in Chicago.  (also several of the venues had special deals for Go Cards - expedited lines or freebies!)  If you are going to a city for general sight seeing I strongly recommend it.

The last night before the Ferris wheel at Navy Pier was to be taken down for renovations, it was going to be running all night.  It would be free after midnight, but the GoCard had it covered.  (we ended up not going on - we arrived at about 10 and the line was already just insane - guestimate of 4 hours - and we decided that we had ridden other Ferris wheels, and since we weren't from the area we had no sentimental feelings about a "last ride".  Since we knew we would be out way past my bedtime, and because there was no way I was doing the lean out thing at the Hancock building's 360 experience, Curt and the Angie went while I stayed back and took a nap!  This was also covered by the card.

There are several tour cruises covered by the card, we only ended up taking one- the Architecture river tour.  It was a great tour, we all enjoyed it.  I think our tour guide Paul was a big part, several times we passed another tour boat going in the other way and those guides sounded like they were just droning on and on and on...  the passengers seemed comatose.  Paul was fun, and opinionated (Trump Tower was gorgeous until the giant letters were attached)

It was a great view from the river

I can't even imagine backing into these parking slots!

If you can see it was pretty hazy and as the tour was winding down, there were clouds descending to cover the tops of the buildings, so we postponed our trip to the Willis (Sears) Tower to there observation deck.  

We did go to the Museum of Contemporary Art.... ugh... a lot of time I look at the art and say - I could do that!  This museum was mostly "why would I want to?"  for example - covering an old school desk with felt carpet pad is art???

(you may notice - I pulled some of the pictures from my snapchat story)
Trying to be positive about the experience (and to be honest, the Angie is clearly more cultured than I am - she liked the museums)  This mural is made of all different styles and colors of shoelaces:

And this is what you make when your button collection gets out of control ( does Jen still look at my blog?)

More on the GoCard tomorrow - don't want to inundate you .