CHICAGO, CHICAGO !! ...Another Excellent Adventure

We have visited Chicago more times than I can count. I had family in the city when I was a kid and Larry traveled there for work off and on for years. When you live in St. Louis it makes a nice weekend get-away; but approaching it from the Lake Michigan side was fun and really special. Our trip across the 60 miles or so of open lake from St. Joe Michigan was a good ride; you will notice that the skyline looks hazy and it was but that soon blew out.
We took a mooring ball at Monroe Harbor during our time there. This put us right in the heart of everything, only a couple of blocks from the Art Institute and Millennium Park. About a mile to Navy Pier which you can see in the shots below.

The wall like structure you see in the foreground here is the seawall that protects the mooring basin from the open waters of Lake Michigan

Another shot of Navy Pier with the giant Ferris Wheel . Did you know that the first Ferris Wheel, invented by a Mr. Ferris was introduced at the Chicago World's Fair in 1893.

Daytime and nighttime views from our mooring with the Sears Tower dwarfing everything else.

The bright white light in the left quarter of this shot is the "castle" on the top of White Castle headquarters building. A moving platform (boat) is not the best for night photography!

Sorry about having duplicate shots here but I am not yet clever enough to eliminate the duplicate after I have mistakenly uploaded it to the blog twice, just bear with me. Anyway this is another view from our "sun room".

In the picture below the building in the foreground with the tall lightening rod is the Prudential Building, believe it or not when I was young it was the tallest building in the City, now it is dwarfed by newer towers. I really thought I was big stuff back in the 60's when I won a National 4-H award and was treated to dinner in the club at the top of the Prudential Building.

One of the major highlights of the entire voyage was our travel through the heart of Chicago. We have just passed through the Chicago Lock (that was build to keep water from the Chicago River from flowing into Lake Michigan) and are about to pass under famous Lake Shore Drive. Chicagoans (and all of us) can thank Daniel Burnham the visionary architect of the Chicago World's Fair and a pioneer in urban planning for the beautiful green ribbon along the lakefront and Lake Shore Drive.

These bridges no longer open for boat traffic (they did when I was a kid) and we had to lower our radar in order to be low enough to pass under some of them. What a thrill passing under all the busy traffic of the city as we continued on our way. You can see from this photo that there are a lot of bridges.


More fabulous views! If you visit Chicago you can experience some of this by taking the Architectural Tour that leaves from Navy Pier, it is really worth it to see the city from this perspective.

Flower baskets line areas along the river, which is really a canal at this point

The beautiful Wrigley Building on Michigan Avenue

And the Michigan Avenue bridge! It's the only one that we noticed with flags.

State Street the home of Marshall Field's, well once upon a time.

On some of those bridges we didn't have very much clearance as you can see. That white area in the foreground is the top of "Lauren Grace". Yikes!

Expensive condo buildings with private docks.

Some of the bridge structures were beautiful, these tower like structures are where the bridge tender operated from back in the day when the actually "tended" the bridges.

Oops! Now we get to the not so nice part of the city. The business district and condos are behind us and the stinky industrial area is there for us to see too. Here they were making cars into "cubes", later they will be loaded onto barges for a trip to somewhere.

Stinky part and all it was still a great ride that gave us a spectacular perspective on Chicago. We loved it!