Christmas in Chicago

Since we were between tenants and needed to make sure the place was ready for the new guy, we headed up to Chicago for business and Christmas. We packed the back of the truck with all the presents and our cold-weather gear and arrived in time for Christmas Eve.

We met up with Johannes' new friend he met in Alaska, who was visiting older relatives in Chicago but wanted to get out and see the city. We had a jam-packed day. We took him to Navy Pier, took him to the German Christmas market and lunch at one of Chicago's many hot sandwich places.

Arcadia had only packed her Converse and kept stepping in melting snow and tried to freeze off her toes. I never shop at Walgreens unless I am in Chicago, then they become my very best friend, with one on every other street corner you can find anything. We found her some fat fuzzy socks, wrapped them up in plastic bags and shoved them back in her wet shoes. It wasn't as impressive as the twisted plastic bag do-rag/ear-muffs I saw on the homeless guy outside of Walgreens, but it warmed her back up for the rest of the day.

Having narrowly avoided icicle-pops for toes, we were able to visit the Art Institute for a little over an hour and hit all the major points. It is usually so crowded that such a speedy attempt would generally fail, but the crowd was oddly sparse and we could get up close and personal (behind the safety wire of course) with Van Gogh, Georgia O'Keefe, Monet, Picasso, Mark Rothko, Jackson Pollock and other favorites.