Arriving in The Windy City

This month I had the most fabulous opportunity to travel to Chicago and Michigan with my wonderful parents!  We signed up for a Tauk tour in Michigan and decided to tack on a few days to explore Chicago on our own before meeting up with the tour.  That town kept us busy every second of every day and I loved it to pieces!  The minute we had checked into our hotel my dad wanted to get out to explore!  So, he took me to see the bean, one of the things I was most excited to see!  Our hotel was only a short 5 minute walk away from the fantastic sculpture.

My first view of the bean!!

As you will soon figure out by the millions of pictures I posted, I was OBSESSED with the bean!!  I couldn't stop taking pictures of it, every angle gave you a completely different view of the city either inside or outside the bean!  So... please don't get bored of bean pictures, they are all cool!

The city behind the bean ....

The city inside the bean ....

Then I went underneath the bean and was blown away by how awesome it continued to be ...

can you see all the different Kates and Craigs in this picture ...

I don't think my dad was quite ready for this pic, but oh well, I am posting it anyway!

After hanging out with the bean all afternoon.  We went back to the hotel and got all cleaned up and picked up mom and headed to dinner.  Mom and dad had been to The Berghoff German restaurant last time they were in Chicago and were excited to take me there, so that is where we dined tonight!

Our little weekend get away happened to fall right in the middle of Chicago's Oktoberfest!  Lucky us! haha they had concerts every night in the plaza and of course Berghoff was all decked out in it's Oktoberfest's best.  They even had a special menu!  All of used ordered their special home brewed root beer to celebrate the holiday.

Anytime I am at an authentic German restaurant, I have to order the wienerschnitzel, it is my favorite German dish!  Luckily, it was on their special Oktoberfest menu, and it was delicious!

I loved the fun, colorful stained glass that lit up half the restaurant

The other walls had pictures from all the old world fairs that happened all over the world!  I am enchanted with all the fascinating things that happened during and were built for these world's fairs, so I loved looking at all the fun, vintage photographs!

The first time Chicago hosted the world's fair, they invented the ferris wheel as their main attraction, so they had plenty of pictures of the world's first Ferris wheel, which were fun to see

After dinner, we all walked back over to the bean to see what it looked like at night!  These cool blue lights were set up all up and down the streets of downtown as an art instillation and I thought they were soooo cool!

The park at night

Of course, the bean was totally awesome at night!  It was also raining, which added another cool element to viewing  this one of a kind sculpture.

After getting soaked in the freezing rain, we stopped in The Corner Bakery to get some hot chocolate and dessert before heading home.  It was the perfect little treat to end such a fun day traveling in this amazing city!

I got hazelnut hot chocolate that came with whipped cream and was dusted with cinnamon, can you say delicious?!  Many more trip posts to come, so please check back to see the other fun things we did!