#Chicago with the Three Tenners

Next stop Chicago for the Three Tenners.

Arrived by the overnight Lakeshore train from Boston. It was 22 hours but just didn't seem like it. Coach chairs - fantastic leather reclining with all the leg room you want. A pleasure watching the states of Massachusetts, New York, Pennsylvania, Ohio and Indiana go by. An impression of size and space with vast tracts of beautiful deciduous trees especially. We travelled about 1000 miles on this leg to Illinois.

We arrived into the famed Chicago Union Street station at 10 in the morning. The scale of the main hall looks cathedral like and although it is a major transport hub it feels cathedral like.

Now at this point I will refer to my previous visit to Chicago. I came on my own about 3 or 4 years ago and wrote a blog. There is no point in repeating it so here is the link :

https://davidshoulder60onwards.blogspot.com/2022/03/chicago.html?m=1

This time while of course I saw much of the same I did get a slightly different perspective. This time we arrived in daylight and there are three of us. Last time I arrived it was night and I was solo. Chicago felt much edgier first time around. Maybe it was.

For much of our time we walked the streets just taking in the unique atmosphere. So many TV series and films have been set over the years in down town Chicago. It is a buzz. My bruvs loved it.

We booked an "architectural" boat tour to look at and hear about the fantastic skyline and you get a different perspective from the Chicago River. Many of the photos I attach below came from this tourist trip. We really enjoyed it.

One fascinating bit of info that came from the boat trip - the flow - the direction of the Chicago River has been reversed. How and why you ask ! ? Well if you look at a map Chicago is on the shore of Lake Michigan - where the Chicago River flowed into the Lake. Lake Michigan was and is the source of drinking water for the city of Chicago. In the 19th century Chicago grew rapidly and all the sewage and garbage went into the river and then into the Lake poisoning the drinking water. Ill health - cholera outbreaks etc became a major problem. Instead of cleaning up the river - unbelievably a vast and expensive engineering project was devised including lock gates and digging a canal deeper than the river. It reversed the flow of the river and solved Chicago's drinking water problem by sending all the garbage south to poison the city of St Louis and the Mississippi River ! One joke - we sent our piss down the river to St Louis. They put it in aluminium cans and sent it back to us as Budweiser ! For the first time people were allowed to swim in the Chicago River last year. Our guide said the river has improved from highly poisonous to just poisonous - ha!

The other thing we did was an extended guided bike tour (operated by Bobby's Bikes). Our guide was Meredith a proud Chicagoan. The four of us rode around Chicago for several hours. If you asked me from the outset if this would work so well I might have doubted it despite booking it. All the traffic, the overhead loop trains, the volume of people, junctions and lights. However we navigated it with ease with Meredith's exaggerated hand signals and some speedy pedalling. We each loved it. Much of downtowns streets are at three levels. The underground part for heavy traffic, the middle for ordinary vehicles and the upper level what you normally see. It was cool to cycle under Trump Tower for instance.

Anyway it was a full on stopover and don't tell them but fun to be with my brothers !

Here are some random mob photos :