Chicago – February, 2011 - Barb's Birthday Present Weekend



Part of our room

This was our trip to celebrate Barb’s birthday and we picked the first weekend in a long time that the weather was at least manageable. There was still a lot of snow, but at least the temperature was not below freezing.
We started Friday with lunch in the suburbs with our friends Dale and Judy Hammersmith at a California Pizza Kitchen and spent a couple of hours with them catching up on each others lives.

Then it was downtown to check into a new hotel for us, the Springhill Suites located at 410 North Dearborn, in River North a couple of block north of the Chicago River. We switched to this hotel because we had been dissatisfied with the Courtyard that we had been staying in.

Wow – did we ever make the right decision. Not only was the room much better, the service and breakfast beat out the Courtyard without any question and we had a great stay. They upgraded us to a corner room on the 26th floor so we had wonderful views.

Ready to go out for the night



Friday night we went to see the musical, The Million Dollar Quartet. This is the story of the only day, December 4, 1956, that Elvis Presley, Johnny Cash, Jerry Lee Lewis and Carl Perkins were ever together in one place. It was a day at Sun Records and it was a fun show.

On Saturday morning, we took a two hour walking tour of the historic downtown to discuss and view the rise of the skyscraper led by a guide from the Chicago Architecture Foundation. It was fun to walk about the downtown and see buildings that we had seen before but had not known their history.



Inside the Rookery

Then it was a quick lunch and a cab ride to the giant Chicago Auto Show where we fell in love with several new cars – will we buy one – probably not, but it was fun to see all of the new models.

For dinner we met Mike and Sue Stypolkowski celebrating their first week of marriage at Bergoffs and spent a couple of hours with them before each headed for shows for the evening.

We went to see the new show Burn The Floor and oh my was it fantastic. This is the type of dancing as seen on “Dancing With The Stars” and wow could those dancers move. We had 3rd row center seats so we could really see the dancers up close. A wonderful show and would see it again when it comes close to Bloomington.

Sunday morning we simply checked out and headed for home to take down most of the Christmas decorations that were still up inside.

All-in-all, a fun weekend to celebrate Barb’s birthday.