Chi-town

We left Lafayettte early yesterday morning with the hopes of beating Chicago traffic. We LOVED the drive into Chicago around lake-shore drive and you'll probably see some video of it (we taped the whole thing we loved it so much).

Once in Chicago we found our host's place in Andersonville, a neighborhood of Chicago in the North side of town. While waiting for our host to get off work we parked the van and explored a bit of the North Side for lunch. As I'm sure it is where all of you are right now, Chicago is HOT, really HOT so after about 2 hours of meandering around the North Side we sat in the shade by the van and tried to cool off for a bit.

We met our host Mike, a good friend of Avi's from high school and bassist in the band Cobalt and the Hired Guns (check them out on myspace and come see us play with them at our hometown show @ Club Cafe July 10). He's got a really cool place with some nice friends and we enjoyed the cool air for a while until we went to dinner in Wrigleyville for my birthday.

After dinner Mike took us to Cobalt's practice space, the Guitarists REALLY REALLY cool house, they treated us to a few songs and gave us directions to get down town by way of the "L" and we were on our way.

Once down town we headed to the Hancock center observatory to ride the 96 floors up to the top and check out the scenes of Chicago. It was absolutely beautiful and breathtaking, while I'm a little afraid of heights (and John is a LOT afraid of heights) it was an awesome experience. We tried without success to barter with the woman who was selling tourist photos and get her down from $22 to $6 for a picture that was already printed that she would end up throwing away. After a while we saw that she was NOT going to budge and took a picture of the picture to capture the moment of the 5 of us (plus one asian tourist friend we picked up) on the top of the Hancock center.

Exhausted, we headed back to Andersonville by train, but not before the BEST TOUR GUIDE EVER stopped us on the streets and gave us a tour to our "L" stop. This bum was probably one of the best salesmen I have ever met. He gave us each a postcard, gave us facts and stories about the sights we were seeing and then when we arrived at our destination DEMANDED money for the "homeless fund", we gave him a few dollars, took the postcards and were on our way.

Today we'll go check out Millennium park, and prep for what should be an awesome show tonight.