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Continuation of a previous post

Note: Most pictures can be enlarged by clicking on them.

Hotel

Day 5 began with breakfast in the hotel lobby. My parents took the kids down to breakfast so that my wife and I could sleep longer, which was very nice. Beta stayed in my parents’ room overnight, but Alpha was in our room. Since the rooms were adjoining and since we had to get the baby up and give him to them, we couldn’t really sleep. So we joined them all in the breakfast room.

After breakfast, we were trying to finalize the day’s plans. I showed Alpha and Beta the tourist-brochure stand, with about a hundred different pamphlets about things to do in the area. They both wanted almost all of them, so I had to set a limit on how many they could take. But that kept them occupied in the car.

Museum

Our first, and main, stop for the day was the Museum of Science and Industry. The drive into Chicago from Schaumburg took a bit, maybe an hour or so. Construction was bad in some spots, but it was alright. We drove right to the museum and parked in their underground lot.

The museum is large. I was impressed by the size of the areas, since they have whole airplanes suspended from their ceiling. That was in the industry section.

The science section was equally large. They had a tornado generator that took up most of the height of the room. And they had a Van de Graaf generator to produce huge sparks of lightning. That was suspended way up high, probably so that no one gets electrocuted. It was very noisy, to the point of hurting my ears (which isn’t too hard to do, despite my children’s attempts to deafen me).

And just when I thought the industry and science rooms were large, we visited the U-505 exhibit. A whole submarine was in that room. They had the sub and a bunch of exhibits about WW-II in general, the US effort to capture a German sub, and various aspects about submarine life. The U-505 alone was worth the price of admission. I think the museum knows that, because they charge extra for it.

One of the interesting exhibits was the life-size model of the sub’s kitchen. At first, I thought it was a scale model of the kitchen. But no, it was really that small.

Park

After paying for the parking at the museum and leaving, we drove to the park a couple miles away and parked in the underground garage. Paying for parking seems to be one of the necessary evils of being in Chicago.

It was a hot and foggy day:

We wandered around for a little while, going along a nice little riverwalk/scenic gardens. We went past the amphitheater thingy and found the silver/mirrored giant jellybean. The kids liked looking at that for about two minutes, then they wandered aimlessly while we adults took pictures and stuff. We headed over to the picture fountains, which the kids liked much more than the jellybean, probably because it changed and it involved water. But we were not prepared to let the kids get wet, so we moved on to try to find Buckingham Fountain because it was supposed to be scenic.

We never did make it to the fountain. We went a block or so, then decided that it was too hot and too late in the day and we should just go to dinner. So we payed for parking and left Chicago to go to dinner in Schaumburg.

It took slightly over two hours to drive the 38 miles. Thankfully, most everyone (except for me and Alpha) took a nap on the drive. I say thankfully because that meant the kids weren’t fussing because it took so long. I was not thankful that I didn’t get to take a nap. It wouldn’t have been too bad except for construction on I-290.

Dinner at Rainforest Cafe was a relaxing way to end the day because there were plenty of things to occupy the kids while we waited for our food. Then we had a short drive back to the hotel for bed.

Stay tuned for Day 6, the dramatic finale of our May Break trip recap.

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