The Windy City

Thats us spent a good 3 days in Chicago taking in the sights and sounds and what fantastic sights and sounds they are! The spiritual home of the Blues Brothers, some of the finest architecture in the world and all this with a freshwater lake including a few fantastic sandy beaches mean we haven't found ourselves short of stuff to do! I'll likely forget some stuff and add it in later but for the time being heres a breakdown of our Chicago break...

Saturday evening we got into the airport around 10ish. After maybe an hour and a half/2 hours on the L we made it do Davis station where we eventually found our hotel, The Margarita European Inn. Hotel is like something from the 1950's or perhaps a little earlier. The furnature and fittings are all quite retro and european which is a welcome break from the american style of "make everything bigger". Its pricey by the trip standards coming in at $160 a night between us which works out at about £30 a night each. Its a beautiful hotel and the evanstan area is lovely too so I dont really grudge paying it esp when the queen bed with candles that me and iain are sharing is so comfy :D Wait... it sounds worse than it is............ The hour on the L is a little longer than desired but to be honest I dont mind, its nice to see a bit of the inbetween, the everyday people going to work etc.

So the nigth we got here we just went to a local pizza place and got a huge pizza between us, there was a blues club down the street but it the main show had been on for an hour and even though it was going till 3:30am we were pretty tired and in need of some sleep. The next day we got on the L reasonably early (compared the following days :P) and headed into town for a stroll about.

** I've just realised a lot of what I've just said I said in the previous post about Chicago, its most likely because we've been nonstop since we got here but im going to put it down to Chicago being so good I want to talk about it twice.***

So we wandered around and got some dinner in irish chain bar/diner on michigan ave called Bennigans where I had a Guiness Glazed bacon burger and Iain manned up and took on the "Irish 1lb Burger" - impressive stuff.


After that we headed back up the magnificent mile to the John Hancock Centre:


** Just realised its 1pm and we haven't left the hotel. I'll upload some good pics and fill in the blanks later on. Need to go do some washing and then I want to go see the store where High Fidelity was filmed which is conveniently near a subway station! :)***





















Later.

Via Chicago

Coming to you live from Evanston, Chicago!

Arrived last night and spent about an hour on the "L" from the airport to our hotel. Gave us a good idea of the size of the place - HUUUUUUUUUUGE! Once we got settled in our hotel, which was worth every penny of the £30pppn we went for a walk around the local area where we got some cheap pizza for dinner - a pattern is emerging.

Evanston is a nice seeminly sleepy city about 20 or so miles north of Chicago so theres lots of quaint little neighbourhoods and shops but it doesn't feel like your in the middle of nowhere (some pictures to come). This morning me and stu did some washing in the local laundremat which was about a 20 minute walk away. The weather up here is much more bareable than in NYC and Boston, a breezy 80F with barely any humidity!

We've a good list of things we want to do here so far (thanks Kirsty! :D) including swimming in Lake Michigan, cycling along the coast, catching some of the film festival in the park, relaxing on Navy Pier, hitting some blues bars, see the Championship Vinyl store used in "High Fidelity" and seeing some museums etc. so a busy few days ahead of us. Tonight however our main concern is getting some tickets to see the Chicago Cubs play some baseball. Dont know who their playing and really how the game is played but im sure it'll be a spectacle none the less. Perhaps afterwards hang around the addison district and get a few beers in or head right into town and get a better idea of where things are. The next 4 days we can spend just seeing the city unlike in Boston where virtually our entire time was spent trying to work out the rest of our plan.

Right we're heading off to see about these tickets,
later.

Red Tape Mania

Spent yesterday strolling around Boston city centre, visiting their holocaust memorial and a few other historic sights along "the freedom trail" which is basically a nice walk around the centre following a red brick path. Ended up seeing a few monuments and getting a nice walk along the main harbour, some serious money in there.

We'd planned to try and get tickets for the Red Sox v Yankees game but it was pretty much a no goer. Tickets were sold out weeks ago and the touts would have been extortionate. Ended up just having dinner in a good irish bar and watching the game there. Oh aye, they only accept US driving licenses or passports as ID in some boston bars which ment me and iain had to go back to the apartment to pick ours up - Mince. Stu was pretty gone by the time we got back, he'd managed to attract the attention of a couple from Florida so at least he wasn't sitting bored!

Got a few hours to kill atm then we're catching a flight over to chicago where we've had to bite the bullet and get a good hotel for 5 nights. Couldn't find anywhere cheap that was either close to the centre of town or even near a subway stop, ahwell!

Our time in Boston has been spent mostly trying to source a car then when that fell through trying to work our budget to find an affordable way to continue the trip. From what I've seen i quite like it and I think that goes for the guys too. Theres a heavy Irish influence (to be expected) and loads of irish bars dotted around the place so its all good. Trying times but we can relax for a few weeks till we get to Kansas. From there we're going to have to see about hiring a car for the west coast.

Heres some pictures from our time in boston. I've not had time to figure out blogspots strange way of adding pictures to blogs without messing up the picture order. Anyway here they are, some good ones of a lady bird that hitched a ride back from lowell (where we tried to buy the car)to boston with us and some of iains brontosaurus ribs.....


Centre of Operations on the Train from NYC - Boston

Street the hostel was on



Lady Bird :D









Boy from N. IReland who'd been living in Boston for 10 years. It was he who uttered the immortal line "Aye, this used to be a good place to get a punch in the mouth"

Iains Brontosaurus Ribs! A well met challange.




Iain has some more pictures of the harbour, town centre and the ship we were on but I haven't had a chance to nick them from him. Will hopefully do that when we get to chicago this evening.

Chicago or bust...

Well after about 3 hours of web searching and calling a load of hotels we've had to bite the bullet and stay somewhere thats ... well a bit more expensive than we would have liked :)

However we are now in the position to enjoy our remaining day in Boston seeing the sights :)

Chicago better be worth the effort!

Later

here and now

Well as we kind of expected things have changed.

We cant legally buy and register a car so thats out the question and hiring a car is pretty costly because of the extra $27 a day surchage as we're under 25. All in all its been a rough few days of crunching the numbers and trying to work out how to get to the west coast and back and still see everything in between.

The plan thus far is to go Boston to Chicago via a cheap flight, get a train/bus up to Milwaukee and stay with some friends for a few days. From there a cheap flight to Denver Colorado and stay with some more friends for a week or so and then take stock of the situation. From there we rent a car and do the westcoast and back through texas where we have some more free accomodation. Then the final leg is Texas to florida (maybe), up to washington and NYC again to get home.

At the moment we're pretty much on budget transport and food wise and we still have about 90% of our money so we're not in trouble yet :) Its going to be an interesting few weeks though.

Later.

Boston

**I wrote this a few nights ago*

That’s us in Boston now. Got off the train and in the main terminal a few guys overheard us discussing how we were going to get to our hostel and offered help straight away. That seems to be the recurring theme so far actually. Aye so we spoke to a conductor who gave us directions which in the end were wrong J He must have misheard the street we were going to (which is 23 Farrington Ave, Chicago for anyone interested with Google Earth/map). At the street the guy directed us to we spoke to a few taxi’s who hadn’t actually heard of the place which was less than reassuring however me and Iain were happy none the less as we got our first rain of the trip! Jumped in a taxi who then dropped us off at the hostel. It’s a nice place in a quiet suburb, quite retro and “Halloween” esque…. Our room has a mini kitchen minus the cooker/hob but its still great to have.

The local place seems quite fun though. We got some dinner at a local pub called The Draft and headed back later for a few beers and some pool. There was some live music on also which was a really good mix of funk and blues with some soul mixed in for good measure (It’s the cheese on the pizza’s… ). So yeah we spent the night in there just having a few buds (which actually taste a lot better over here than at home, must be the lack of preservatives) and enjoying the bad.

Got to admit so far my preconceptions of these kinda places have been pretty much blown out the water. Everyone seems very friendly and pretty eager to help. I bet the accent has something to do with that though. Ahwell, sorting out a car 2moro hopefully.

Later

Chris.

PIcture Update

Right here we go. Going to upload a chunk of pictures just now which might not be all in order. I've so far amassed a good few hundred pictures and videos and thats after the NYC camera disaster so heres a selction. Might try and upload them to a bebo album also but here you'll be able to click on them and get better quality ones.
Heres goes:(Having some positional problems here so I'll just upload them all and try and figure out how to fit them better later - Basically the first few are from me and stu's brief trip to the NYC museum of natural history, then our travels to poughkeepsie, our time in poughkeepsie including one of the guys we were staying withs weird shoes... then our trip to boston so far.




































There you go, some pictures for the time being. I'll likely add the rest of them in full res to flikr or my photobucket account so they can be easily viewed and captioned as oposed to this nonsense.

So aye if you click on the pictures it'll give you a bigger res but the full res ones i have here on the laptop.

Anyway thats it for the time being.

Later.