Chicago!

I never did get a good skyline picture

For Spring Break, we both desperately needed a vacation. And since Chicago is only 6 hours away and neither of us have ever been there, we thought it would be perfect! We found some pretty good deals for a hotel in the suburbs and a "Go Chicago" card which meant that on the day we activated the card, we could go to as many things as we could without paying (because we had already paid for the card). We got to our hotel in the evening on Thursday the 17th. We would've gotten there sooner except we had the car troubles I blogged about before, so we had to leave later. We had originally planned to go to the Art Museum because it is free Thursday night, but we got there too late, so we ended up watching the BYU vs Wafford game.

The next day was our "Go Chicago" day, so we started early so we could squeeze in as many places as we could! But first we had to figure out the public transportation! They certainly need more signs for visitors to find where to buy tickets! I was certainly grateful I served a mission in a place where I only used public transportation. It made it much easier to figure Chicago out. But where to find the tickets! That was the hard part. We finally figured it out and were soon on a bus heading to the Shedd Aquarium just a little after 9 (when it opened).

On the bus on the way to Shedd

The Shedd Aquarium was awesome! We were on a schedule so we didn't linger too long on anything, but we stayed there for a good 2 hours and basically saw everything. We even got to touch starfish! My absolute favorite thing though was the Anaconda!

This gigantic, beautiful, powerful snake was 2 feet away from me! Of course it was in a tank and I never saw his head, but I was excited! For those of you who don't know me very well, I absolutely love snakes! Of course, I would never touch one that was dangerous (such as this one) but I do want a tame one as a pet one day!

Seahorses. They were little and moving fast so it was hard to get a good picture

Nate's favorite were the Seahorses because he hasn't ever seen them before. And some were pretty brightly colored. Some were also sleeping like an opossum! Their tails were attached to a branch and they were hanging upside down. I liked the fact that the males were the ones who actually carried the babies in their tummies:)

A huge river fish. It was probably almost as long as me!

A Lobster

An Octopus

Nemo!

A huge Iguana! Posing just for us!

That's a shark, but it's hard to tell

Penguins!

Beluga Whales

After the Shedd, we ate our lovely lunch of peanut butter sandwiches while waiting for the bus to take us to the Museum of Science and Industry. We only had 2 hours here as well and you could've spent all day! So we didn't end up seeing all of it. But it was pretty cool! Lots of hands-on things!

The outside of the Science and Industry Museum

 It was kind of funny, we had to go down all of these stairs to get our "tickets" (show our Go Chicago car), then up all these stairs to get to the museum. Didn't seem very efficient, but whatever.

A giant old locomotive

A model of Chicago. The tall black one behind Nate is the Willis aka Sears Tower

A model of Seattle! The train went from Chicago to Seattle

A tornado! Inside the Science Museum!

I'm afraid that's all the pictures I took there. We were having too much fun playing so I didn't think of taking pictures very often!
And this is a long post already, so I will finish our adventures later. I'm only about 1/3 of the way done!