Illinois; Chicago, Monks Mound, & the Bean

May 16, 2014

DETOUR:
In our travels from Kentucky to Missouri we did cross through a small part of Illinois before entering into Missouri. While on our Violet City lantern lit cave tour in Mammoth our guide suggest we visit a place called Cahokia Mounds. So this was our first pit stop in Illinois technically.

On top of Monks Mound

Cahoki Mounds

As we were driving to this place, we literally drove through the ghetto. It was quite sketchy, graffiti written all over everything, run down houses, torn up fences, and police cruiser everywhere I looked. Totally, not sure our guide knew where he was taking us. Not feeling too confident about this place any more.

Art in Chicago

Oh LOOK! There it is! From the rough neighborhood streets to this beautiful piece of land. We finally arrived. Parked the car and made our way into the visitor center. It is technically free to visit, but they do have a donation box. We donated a few dollars for our visit and asked the park ranger for information on where to go and what to do. She gave us a trail map and we walked out the back door.

We took a walk to the highest mound there was. It was so cool and very unique. Monks Mound is the largest pre-Columbian earth work in the Americas and the largest pyramid north of the Mesoamerica. Since 6^th grade when I started learning all about pyramids, mostly the Egyptian ones, I have had this fascination with them. I find them incredibly unique, well designed, and well-constructed. This was right up my alley. We hiked up several steps to get to the top of it where you have wonderful views across the Mississippi and over into St. Louis where you could see the Gateway Arch towering high amongst the other buildings surrounding it.

Steps to the top of Monks Mound

After our trip to Missouri was concluded, it was off to Illinois. Chicago in particular. Here is where we had our 3^rd event. 50 more to go! We decided not to camp in Chicago, given we would not be in the City for long. This was our busiest craziest weekend yet! We opted to spend 2 nights in a hotel here.

I have heard Chicago is known to be the “Windy City.” That it was. Windy, cold, and rainy. We arrived in our hotel late afternoon, ate dinner and Becca went out with some friends and I stayed back at the hotel to unwind a little bit. The next morning we awoke groggy as heck and decided to take a walk down to the water front to Navy Pier. It was windy, cold, and drizzly. We shopped around and picked out our post cards to mail home to our families. (I would eventually collect a post card from most states or places we visited by the end of this trip)

Later that evening we went to our event at Moosejaw Mountaineering. We met some incredible people who worked there. Unfortunately, this event was a bit of a bust. The least amount of people we would eventually see at any of our events.

After our event, we had to pack up as quickly as we could to make it to the Airport to pick up a second rental car. Once having our second rental car we would then have to drop our vehicle off to receive its custom wrap job for the next 3 days. Well, this didn’t go as smoothly as we both were hoping.

Once at the airport, we had approach the rental car company after waiting in line for what seemed like forever, for them to tell us there is no car available. So we tried 2 more rental companies to tell us the same thing. We finally got to the last one and they had one for us, but at a much higher cost. Who cares, we needed it! We left the airport that night at 11:00pm. We had to be up around 6:00am the next morning to drop our vehicle off to get wrapped. So we were quite tired.

6:00am came way too quickly but we were up and out of the hotel. We dropped our vehicle off, after taking only the things we would need out of it for our few days we would then spend in the Indiana Sand Dunes. (I will blog about this trip in my Indiana blog.)

Me at the Bean!

After our weekend was over, we had to travel back to Chicago to pick up our freshly wrapped car on Monday. We were pretty excited for this. There isn’t anything cooler than riding around in a decked out car that says who you work for with pretty flowers and hikers all over it! So I thought.

We had a few hours to spare before our car was ready so we decided to actually explore the city now that we had some down time. We parked our rental in a parking garage and googled interesting things to do in Chicago. Well the Bean was on the list. So we started there. The Bean was massive, and super shiny and reflective, but it was also completely covered in gross greasy fingerprints. Probably from people all over the world. I wonder if they ever clean it? We took a few photos here and kept walking through all of the parks, and gazed at all of the beautiful fountains. Lastly, we found this very cool art located in Grant Park. It was called the Agora. It was 106 nine-foot tall torsos made of cast iron. How cool is that? This art work derives its name from the Greek word for meeting place. We took some really funny photos here and enjoyed all the art-work we came across while here.

Agora Art in Grant Park, Chicago

AT LAST! It was time for me to hunt down the most popular cupcake place in town. We eventually found one and enjoyed a great cupcake from there as well. Then we proceeded to hit Panera Bread for lunch and then go pick up our vehicle.
There were so many great things I am sure we missed while in Chicago, but time was not on our side. The few things we did get to enjoy were spectacular.