We Take Ourselves With Us

After a very full Sunday--and with some members of the family still struggling with jet lag combined with what is effectively 24 hours of daylight--everyone got a late start to Monday. Harper and Penn were booked on an Icelandic horse riding excursion, so Ned dropped them at their pick up spot on his way to the Iceland Costco to gas up our car. More on their trip later. Ned's two must-do Reykjavik museums were the Icelandic Punk Museum (yes!) and the Phallological Museum (much less yes). But, we swore til death do us part, so we set off together for what I decided to call (with good reason, as it turns out), the penis museum. It was another blue sky Reykjavik day, and the city was showing off its best colors.  What does one eat before going to the penis museum? You guessed it--hot dogs! They were as good as on day one; again, it's the crispy onions. Then, the penis museum. The back story: a totally not-at-all creepy and super-normal Icelandic guy--who worked in a grade school...

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...