We had the briefest of a window with no rain, so we took advantage and headed over to Millennium Park for a stroll. This space was conceived to commemorate entering the third millennium…it didn’t open until 2004. Apparently the construction ran into massive cost over-runs due to poor planning and cronyism. Sound familiar, Boston?
Welcome to Millennium Park
This is where you can find the Cloud Gate, a 100 ton sculpture which has been dubbed “The Bean” for obvious reasons.
The city reflected in the Bean.
A little closer, my dear.
The underside is called the “Omphalos” which is greek for “navel”. I thought it looked a bit more like another piece of anatomy. Tee Hee.
Our room was due to be ready so we moseyed on over, enjoying a nice look-see along the way.
Looking real nice.
I considered getting AirBnB again for this trip, but the hotels were really reasonable. Probably because no normal person would visit Chicago in February. We ended up at a Homewood Suites. It was quite nice.
King Bed
Clean bath. No complaints.
A small, well appointed kitchen.
The boy slept on a pullout in the living room (not pictured), the dear. We took a load off and charged up our phones for a bit, then hit the town! Matt picked our next destination, Headquarters Beercade. This place was awesome!!! They had fantastic local craft beer on tap, as you might expect, but this place was chock-full of vintage pinball machines and video games!
One of two bars.
Pinball galore!
Skee Ball!
Classic video games
This is the “DJ” booth. DJ Macbook.
The walls here were filled with cassette tapes, for show, I’m sure.
My junior high sound track right there.
We conservatively spent about three hours here. There’s no cover charge and, get this, the games are free! No coins needed. The vibe here was so cool. They had a TV’s here and there, but instead of running CNN or sports, they ran 1980s movies! So cool.
No worries about where to set your beer!
Spent keg as a table. Clever.
Our tummies were starting to grumble. We considered just getting some food here, but we did have a whole city to see. Matt chose our dinner spot too.
The Purple Pig
This place was packed to the brim on a Monday night. It was very hipster-like with hightop communal tables. We got seated pretty quickly and started with a cocktail.
A very well crafted, but extremely small Manhattan.
Attractive Bar
The menu here is mostly small plates. The prices were not so small. Don’t get me wrong, everything was excellent, there was just no way were going get full without having to leave a limb behind. The menu online doesn’t even have prices. If you have to ask, you can’t afford it, I guess!
I panic ordered a couple meats and cheeses.I believe this was about $28.
Everything was superb.
We moved on to wine.
Fired chicken Skins with White Beans and Anchovy
I think this was some sort of potato coquette dish with a fried egg on top.
We enjoyed all these dishes, but we decided to bail and find a place for a burger and a beer. We had spent almost twice as much as we had at the Dim Sum restaurant for a quarter of the food.
Matt took to the internet to find a dive bar. Boy did he ever.
This menu was a little less refined that the Purple Pig.
The guests were a bit rough. Jeff almost got into a fist fight. I’ll share that story with you over a beer.
This was a heavy greasy burger. Just the ticket!
We were all ready to cash in at this point. We finished up and then had a very damp walk home in the rain, getting pretty well soaked. There were some challenges, but really did have a stellar day hanging out together.
Up Next: Can we get out of the box?