Cruisin Through The City

One activity that all three of us had been dying to do in Chicago, was take an architectural boat tour down the middle of the city.  So, that is they very first thing we did when we woke up on our first full day in the city!  The walk down to the river was beautiful in the morning sunshine.  Chicago is such a clean, classy place.

I loved the juxstaposition of the classical Greek architecture next to the sleek, streamline architecture of the very modern Trump building

We cruised with Chicago's First Lady, Chicago's finest fleet

It was the most perfect day for a ride down the river.  The sun was shinning, the sky was blue and we were so excited to be there!

Darn that man and his ginormous white hat, it's going to be burned in my memories forever

It was fascinating to see and learn about all the various kinds of architecture that makes up Chicago's skyline.  Art deco is probably the most prominent, which I love, it is such a classy style.  But there is also tons of modern designs, Greek revival designs etc.

I thought these two apartment buildings were interesting, even though they may look dated to some of you.  The designer wanted these building to look like trees with the centers to be the trunks, the rooms to be the branches, and the balconies to be the leaves but in a stylized way.  I think he achieved his goal.

This is a classic art deco design, it's called an arm chair design because it obviously looks like an armchair

I loved the art deco details on this facade

Going under a draw bridge!

I loved the Chevron exoskeleton on the building on the left

Yes, my mom and dad were on the cruise as well.  It wasn't just me taking pictures of myself by myself haha

Sears Tower, the tallest building in North America.  And we got to go to the top of it .. at night!  Pictures of that to come...!

Notice the building with the golden top?  That is now the Hard Rock Hotel, and the designer said that the top was meant to look like a bottle of campaign.

The tour ended with a bang by giving us wonderful views of the entire skyline

After our wonderful little cruise, we started heading in the direction of Navy Pier.  We passed by a lot of amazing buildings on our way.  I am just so impressed with Chicago and it's beautiful atmosphere, it's amazing and unique buildings and the lovely weather it provided for us!

We quickly became interested and curious about this building that had pieces from different famous buildings from around the world built directly into it's walls.  We found bits and pieces of everything from the Parthenon in Greece to the White House to the Duomo Cathedral in Florence to the great Egyptian pyramids!  We closely inspected three of it's four walls and had fun looking at all the places that were represented.

One wall was dedicated to representing each of the 50 united states of America, and had a stone from some landmark that is famous from each state.  It took us a while to find Utah and were starting to think that it wasn't cool enough for Chicago.  But we eventually found it!  It was one of the very last ones.  I was surprised that they chose a stone from the temple as our landmark, for a lot of other states they took things from national parks, so I was expecting something from Moab or Zions or something along those lines.  But how cool that they chose the temple to represent our great state!