Over the weekend my roommate and I went to Chicago for a one night stay. We really just needed to get out of town, both as a way to relax and get away from every day life, and as sort of one last thing to do before I went back to school today.
We left at about 7am, and made a stop about a half hour south in Janesville to pick up donuts for the trip. We stopped at Dunkin’ Donuts because we wanted to start the trip off right by doing something that we don’t normally do. We have no Dunkin’ Donuts or Krispy Kreme here in Madison. In fact the only dedicated donut shop I can think of is a local one that caters to college kids downtown. They have better donuts overall than either the two chains, but they often don’t have a decent selection. So going to Dunkin’ Donuts still has its appeal since they always have everything, plus the donut holes they have are very yummy.
When we got to Chicago, we went to the Museum of Science & Industry. Now to be honest, I think this choice of a museum was a bit of a mistake on my part. I was trying to bring my roommate to do something she hadn’t done before that would be fun, and I remember going to a museum when I was a kid in Chicago a couple of times with my Mom. The problem is that looking back on it, I think we went to the Field Museum so the Science & Industry Museum, wasn’t quite what I thought it was going to be. Be that as it may, it was still quite fun and we saw a lot of cool things. They were rebuilding a number of exhibits, probably for the summer season, so that was a little disappointing, though we had fun at the new Body Worlds 2 exhibit which had real human bodies on display in various positions and forms to allow people to really see them. It wasn’t perfect, most exhibits we were disappointed in in some way. For instance, the Fairy Castle which while cool, was not about fairies which we were really excited to see. The Snow Story exhibit was about a book we hadn’t heard of before and was extremely small and uninteresting (though we thought it might be a good exhibit, it wasn’t). And while the Body Worlds exhibit was cool, it was a bit much and you were forced to see it all at once during a certain time. We would have liked to have gone, seen half of it, then gone to a different exhibit and come back later. However, this wasn’t allowed. There were some pleasant surprises in the museum however. They had an olden day town which was really quite cool to walk down the streets of. I thought going into the airplane was cool. And it was fun to watch the industrial robots draw pictures together.
After the museum, we went to a hotel we reserved in Elgin. We really wanted to make a hotel stay part of the trip because we wanted it to feel like more than just a day trip, which is what it really was. Plus we wanted to spend some time in the pool and hot tub. Elgin was convenient because it was only an hour away from Chicago so it wouldn’t be too far away from the Museum, and would also offer a fairly short trip home which it did. We spent probably 3 hours combined in the pool and hot tub both Saturday night and Sunday Morning. We lounged, we relaxed. It was nice. We had a good weekend and it helped us let go a bit.
Unfortunately last night’s return home was a disaster. We stopped at Olive Garden in Janesville on the way home because we wanted to have a nicer sit down meal to eat, and we knew we didn’t really have food at home. While the food was great, by the time we got home, my roommate had an upset stomach and spent 2 hours in the bathroom. Then I broke my injection bottle and had to throw it out and use my very last one instead (thankfully that one worked ok). And then my roommate decided to go shovel out her car a bit so that she didn’t have to deal with the new snow quite as much. Then went grocery shopping, and when we came back, someone had taken her spot. After finding out whose it was, she asked him to move out of the spot and he said he would find his keys and move it. She waited for him in her car for 10 minutes and then parked on the street, returning home crying because he just left her there and she spent a good hour shoveling that spot only to have some ass steal it while she went shopping. Another 10-15 minutes later, he still hadn’t moved so I went and asked him to move it, and he showed me an old chart saying it was open, even though it was an old chart and I knew better. So finally after about a half hour I started calling my landlord and left a message with his wife and on his office phone. It took the guy an hour and a half to find his keys and move his car. I was pissed. My landlord came in at about 9pm to see what was the fuss and basically said he would post a notice about it today. We’ll see how much that actually works. These people have parked in our spot a number of times in the past and we have left a number of notes on his car and he just doesn’t listen. He obviously is illiterate.
It is unfortunate that after such a nice little vacation that the whole trip seemed ruined by a disastrous homecoming, but hopefully the fun we had can still overshadow the awful night.