Steve and Steph's USA blog: Chicago

This is the home of Ferris Bueller, great hot dogs, deep dish pizza, the first skyscraper and the tallest brick building.

We’re staying at a mate’s house in a suburb outside of the city. He’s not lived in the apartment for very long after moving here for work from the UK and we joked that our car has more furniture than his place. It’s true, but what his place has is space, heat and a much-needed washing machine, lovely.

We only spent a day in the city here so didn’t see all the sights, but we strolled around the place saw lake Michigan stretching over the horizon. it still amazes me how big these lakes are! we went up the John Hancock tower and marvelled at the view but only briefly. This is an expensive restaurant and bar so we bailed before we were compelled to sit down and order expensive drinks.

We had pizza at Lou Malnati’s. Deep dish and massive, it was more like a cheesy quiche than what i know as pizza. They make the crust in a, well, deep dish and put the cheese at the bottom, the sauce on top. See here:

Way too big for the three of us to eat in one sitting, though I tried hard, very hard. We took it home and finished off the remainder later.

We did a little more wandering and decided that Chicago is a nice place. It’s clean, laid back, ordered and has enough city-ness to make it feel interesting, but not so much pedestrian and vehicular traffic to make it too stressful. There is one stretch near the JH tower that is, I guess, the Oxford street of this town and that is rammed with shoppers, with wealthy ladies of leisure, street artists who mainly stand still until change lands in their pot, folks walking rat-dogs on bright coloured string, trendy souls in puffy gilets carrying cardboard clad coffee in mittened hands, that sort of thing.

Here are a few pictures, staring with our approach to this town.

Well, it settled. I think I said it would. This is north Indiana and about 60 miles from Chicago. The snow was coming down hard but only for a few miles. I guess winter comes earlier to these northern-climes. It’s still noticeably south of London, however.

This is the view from the restaurant at the John Hancock tower on the 39th floor. Not bad, I think

A couple of random buildings down town. This is an HDR image that i have deliberately made a little weird. It’s three images of varying brightness and exposure taken of the same thing. When they’re put together in software they can be made natural or unnatural looking and this is a bit more of the latter.

Not ours, sadly. This is a Ferrari 458. There were are few Ferraris parked on the street near a Bentley dealer.

None were kicked backwards through plate glass at the end of this day off.

A view of the city on the way in. We had a lot of time to study this view as there was about 20 miles of traffic to get where we were going.

Bored, we were. We’re used to travelling roads that have about 1 car every five minutes.

The next day we went to Portillos for a massive hot dog and cheesy fries, nice:

Then on to the Volo car museum. It’s a museum with a rotating base of classic and interesting cars. They sell 70 cars a month so in a sense it’s a a car dealer with a few interesting motors from movies in there too. It’s full of classic cars and a huge stash of muscle cars.

I have tried to put the more interesting photos in here so I don’t appear too car-bore-ish.

The owners are 2 brothers who’ve run the place for about 50 years, and one of the brothers’ 2 sons. There are 4 ‘sheds’ with cars of varying vintage so they manage what they’re more interested in.

They’ve designated an area for ‘cool cars’ only. This dull Ford did not heed the sign. Not cool

In the shop we found a book on Jaguar E-Types. The silver car in the photo is the one my dad used to own a few years ago and he took it for this photo-shoot before it sold. Its image has spread to the new world!

Here’s Steff’s favourite car in the whole place, a 1958 Chevy Impala convertible. I’m afraid to say it was priced at 80 large, so we’ll stick with the ‘burb.

Here’s one of the 249 (I’m not exaggerating) General Lees that were used in the filming of the 145 episodes of the Dukes of Hazzard. 17 were totalled during production, but here’s one for us to look at.

I remember the window aperture looking a lot more get-through-able when I was a kid watching the show. As an adult I might struggle, and that lock protuberance is poorly placed for such an ingress.