We Take Ourselves With Us

We started Friday morning with a breakfast with a view.  Harper rediscovered the joy of peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and chided us for never have "regular bread" in the house.  Ah, the midwest and white bread--a match made in demography!  Note that Penn's breakfast somehow included tiny candy bars.  Where are this kid's parents?! Our first goal of the day was to visit the neighborhoods of my childhood.  We started in St. Francis, which is where I lived for almost a decade, from 5 to 14.  My house was just off Kinnickinnic (or KK), three doors down from this bar: Here it is.  When I was little, there used to be a gigantic evergreen in the front yard between the "picture window" and the small bedroom window, so it didn't seem as stark.  The view from that picture window used to be a grocery store parking lot (where I learned to ride a bike), then it was a used car storage lot, then nothing.  Now, it's a huge ...

Just in case we were looking for validation of our decision to head to Chicago and skip Cedar Point, Mother Nature provided it: an absolutely perfect blue sky day in the (admittedly, still windy) city.  (For the record, it poured all day in Sandusky, and almost none of the rides at CP opened.) I've been to Chicago bunches of times, and we've been here with the kids twice before.  But, we've never stayed as far south as McCormick Place, which gave us a new neighborhood to explore.  After arriving very late Friday (we checked in about 11), we were hungry Saturday morning and set off for breakfast.  Our path took us past the Willie Dixon Blues Heaven Foundation, which featured a lovely garden in tribute to Blues legends (note the sky ... see, perfect!). We were walking up a section of Michigan Ave call the Motor Row District, which is where all the dealerships were located beginning in the early 1900s.  History!  Plus, we also found the historic...