Chicago

After three months at camp, on 11th August, four friends and I embarked on our travels around America. Our first stop was Chicago, which was around 6 hours on a Greyhound bus from St Louis, MO. We arrived at our Chicago hostel around 8:30pm and went straight out to find some pizza after our long day of travelling, then went to bed ready to explore the city the next day.

Because we were so tired from working at camp all summer, we didn't want to get up early and rush about in the morning. We left the hostel around 10:30am for it to start chucking it down with rain, which resulted in us being soaked even with our rain coats on. Lesson: when it rains in America, it really pours, and you will get soaked.

Undeterred by the rain, but very annoying, we carried on with our plans and headed to the subway to go to Millenium Park. On our way there, we detoured into Macy's to get out of the rain but I managed not to buy anything! Once we had finished browsing, the rain had actually stopped, leaving it cloudy, but a nice temperature for walking round outside. We walked to Millenium Park where we saw Cloud Gate, or "The Bean" as everyone calls it (in my opinion, it looks way more like a bean than a cloud). We also took in the view of the cityscape from the park and sat down by the front of Lake Michigan.

After a quick break, we took a steady walk around to Navy Pier, where there are shops, restaurants and a ferris wheel to get great views of the city. Later on in the day we headed back to our hostel for a rest when it started raining heavily again.

Our next day in Chicago was Saturday and we planned to see Willis Tower and Michigan Avenue for some shopping. We debated going up to the Sky Deck at Willis Tower but decided we didn't want to spend the money and went for Chipotle instead, which ended up being somewhere we ate quite a bit on our travels! 

We then carried on the Michigan Avenue where we did some browsing of the shops and saw some really great architecture.