Bloggin' America

I was about ready to head to bed when George jumped up out of his chair and said, “We are going to The Second City and catching their late show! It is our destiny.” I was completely thrown off by that proclamation, considering George is the least funny person I know and said he wanted to go to a comedy show. It was already 9:30 at night and Ray was slowly fading away into Dream Land, so Glenda offered to stay in the hotel room since Ray wasn’t old enough to go to the show anyway. Keep going...

We hurriedly opened the door to our hotel room, threw our stuff inside, shut the door, and headed back to the elevator. Mom looked concerned, and Ray was screaming Glenda’s name down the hotel corridor. He pressed the down arrow on the elevator about a million times. Click click click click. The elevator came up to our level finally and the doors opened. A group of people came out of the elevator and Mom rushed us in before the doors closed on us. “Oh hey guys,” shouted a familiar voice. GLENDA! “I was asking about restaurants around here and all of a sudden you guys were gone.” Keep going...

It felt nice to get inside from the cold for a while. The lobby of the tower was actually smaller than you would think for such an impressive piece of engineering. There was a replica Willis Tower in the lobby next to the obligatory gift shop that kind of made me wish that I could just climb that little one now. Just the prospect of being so high in the sky was starting to make my knees feel like Jell-o. This was the moment. Keep going...

After leaving Milwaukee and heading down I-94, my heart started pumping a little faster — mostly from the squeaking noise from the Falcon (which I thought was a serial killer attached to the bottom of the Falcon), but also because we were finally headed to Chicago. The Windy City. The Second City. Chi-Town. OK, you get the picture. It was just a two-hour drive from Milwaukee to Chicago, but it felt like an eternity. Almost every town or city on I-94 had the word “oak” in it or some variation of a tree. I was tired of seeing trees; I wanted some concrete! Since we had left Milwaukee in the evening, I ended up falling asleep just outside Chicago as I desperately searched for any sign of the Willis Tower in the night sky. Keep going...