Focus on purple, originally uploaded by Aunt Christina.

Finally uploaded all of my Chicago "Not MediawestCon" photos this morning. The full set is here. We saw some really pretty plants and flowers in the Lurie garden (above), ate a lot of good food :-) and generally had fun walking around the city.

Under the "Bean" or Cloud Gate sculpture we saw ourselves reflected very weirdly.





The Crown Fountain has video images of the faces of Chicagoans, and every five minutes or so they spit at you!



And we even saw some wildlife, this duck family, at the Lurie Garden.
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Now on to Relay for Life photo-uploading...

The Bean has landed!, originally uploaded by Aunt Christina.

Now we're back home and I can blog about the rest of our trip. I don't have the "real" pictures from my camera uploaded yet, but here are a couple from my cellphone. On Sunday, we eschewed the train route and instead I drove all five of us about an hour to downtown Chicago, where we found an underground garage in which to park. We then spent the whole morning walking around Millennium Park, where this "bean" sculpture is located. It is so cool! Especially on a bright sunny day like we had. The weather was gorgeous, sunny and 60 with of course a strong breeze from off the lake. Perfect.


We went to the Lurie Garden, another part of Millennium Park, where a nice volunteer tour guide gave us a brief history and tour of the garden. It is a four seasons garden, so there is something growing or blooming all year long. And part of the design is this big purple "river" of salvia plants, which was not quite fully in bloom when we were there. She showed us photos of it in summer, and it really does look like a winding river of purple flowing through the entire green garden. It is supposed to represent the Chicago River. We thought that was a neat idea. I took a lot of closeups of flowers which will be on flickr later. After exploring the entire park, just about (it's 57 acres, if I remember right! so ha ha, no we didn't walk through ALL of it), we stopped for lunch at the Park N Grill outdoor cafe area, and then we wanted to stop at a Garrett's Popcorn shop for some awesome carmel corn. But despite getting great directions from a friendly couple of guys in the park (they had their IPhones out and Pat had her Ipod Touch out and we were all geeking out), it turned out not to be at that location any more. So we drove back to the hotel empty handed. (However, on the drive home, Pat and I were stopped at an Indiana Turnpike rest stop where they happened to sell South Bend Chocolate Company popcorn, which is drizzled in chocolate, so we bought some to pretend it was Garrett's. :-)


Back at the hotel we hung out in our room--we had lovely suite rooms with a living room area, couch, tables, plenty of lounging area--playing The Amazing Race DVD board game and our favorite board game "Survive!".

Then had a fantastic steak dinner at Jimmy's Charhouse nearby. (This hotel, Marriott's Springfield Suites in Lincolnshire, was a great choice because there are a TON of places to eat nearby. Plus the movie theater and shops.) After dinner we watched a little fannish tv--episodes of Sports Night and Firefly that I had brought with me. On Monday, we slept in, and missed the hotel's complimentary breakfast, so we ate at Walker Bros. pancake house. OH. MY. GAWD. did they have good food! tons of breakfasty stuff--omelettes, french toast, pancakes, crepes, German pancakes (which I was sorely tempted to try), a huge Apple Pancake that looked to be as big as a loaf of bread and which you could get frozen to go, and so on. Very nice. We hung out some more, sharing a fanfiction story I had brought--I got to practice my Read Aloud skills as I read the story to all of us, that was fun! It was a Quantum Leap/Vampire Files crossover--so that we were a little bit of Mediawest--then we checked out of the hotel and went to lunch at Big Bowl. Mmm, terrific Chinese and Thai food. Just perfect. They had a great stir fry bar (kind of like Mongolian BBQ) where you picked your own veggies and meat and sauce and they fried it up for you. Sadly, all good things must end, and we had to say our goodbyes and hit the road for home. Pat and I didn't get home til midnight, our time, but it was totally worth it to have one more fun mealtime with J & B & M. (And with a good book on CD playing in the car--Doomwyte by Brian Jacques: full cast of voices--the time flew. Pat did her knitting while I drove, so we were both multitasking.)

Now it's off to work again. Sigh. And to find out how everyone else's Memorial Day went. Hopefully a good time was had by all. I did follow some Tweets by cannellfan from MediawestCon, so we were virtually there. But we missed seeing the usual folks, though not enough to go back to Mediawest--our first NotMediaWestCon was a rousing success and we're already planning next year's trip.

Sears Tower walkby, originally uploaded by Aunt Christina.

Writing this from our lovely hotel north of Chicago, where we just finished our first full day of "NotMediaWestCon 2009." Normally I spend Memorial Day weekend in Michigan at Mediawestcon, but this year I and my four friends Jenn Bonnie Michelle and Pat all decided to skip it in favor of our own vacation get-together. So we have two great rooms (though they were supposed to be an adjoining suite, but that was changed at the last minute because there are two wedding parties here!) and we are having fun so far. Yesterday we all arrived by 2pm and had lunch, then hung out talking and exploring the local restaurants to pick something for dinner (Cheesecake Factory won, because the unique places all had long waits). after dinner we went to the theater next door to see Star Trek. (Second time for all but Pat.) In the parking lot I happened to park right next to a van decorated as the shuttle Galileo from NCC-1701D--the license plate was WARPD. Unfortunately I didn't have my camera nor my cellphone with me at the time (a rare occurrence!) so I never got a photo of it. We figure a local Trek group was there to see the movie. (In another spot I saw a car with a license plate TARDIS, so evidently the Whovians were there as well. :-) Anyway, we love the movie and had a lot of fun dissecting it and talking about our favorite parts.



Today we had breakfast at the hotel and then began our trip downtown to the Chicago Museum of Science and Industry to see the Harry Potter Exhibition. (this is our group shot outside the museum, using my cellphone so that we could upload it right away, and no one was around who could take it for us so it was goofy with me holding my phone out at arm's length!) We wanted to avoid driving in the city, so we took the METRA train (commuter train, like Cleveland's RTA but these are bigger--they all have double decker cars!) most of the way, then had to get 1.3 miles to the other train, so after some discussion over which transportation choice to make, we hopped on a bus to get to the next train station, down on Michigan Ave at the lakeshore. Eventually, with only one missed train stop, we made it to the museum: it took us three hours!! Sheesh. We had hoped to see the museum first, then the HP exhibit, which you had to buy timed entry tickets for ahead of time (it was sold out today), but because we were so late getting there we just did a quick tour of the U-505 German submarine exhibit before going in to Hogwarts.


Ah, Hogwarts. The Quidditch stadium. Gryffindor common room. Potions and Divination and Defense Against the Dark Arts classrooms. They were all there. There were props and costumes from all 5 movies, plus a couple of things from the not-yet-released Half Blood Prince. Very cool! I loved looking at stuff up close, seeing the details. I can't go into all of it here tonight, but I took notes (because we coudn't take any photos) on what I saw so that I could remember it and write it up later. Lots of fun. The costumes are beautiful, and so much attention to detail on everything. The self-guided audio tour is a must, because you get to hear behind-the-scenes tidbits from the producer, costume designer, prop guys, art designers etc, on why they made certain choices or how things came to be done that way. Neat. After the tour, which we took our time with (two hours! the audio adds half an hour, plus there were a lot of people in the exhibit so we had to wait for slow people to get out of our way too), we ate late lunch and did the rest of the museum exhibits in a whirlwind. great stuff. Tomorrow we are going back downtown to Millennium Park and not sure what else. But I am deadbeat tonight, lots of walking! so I am signing off. Look for photos on my Facebook or Twitter or Flickr account; as i get them on my phone I'm sending them there. Night!