June 4: Oconomowoc, Wisconsin

Our day in Chicago involved a lot of walking. We are tired just thinking about it. But the weather was nice and it was good to stretch our legs for a bit.

We started off by walking from Kristina Chicago’s apartment to the Museum of Contemporary Art. Since we arrived well before they opened, we stopped for breakfast and to look over some brochures we had collected.

The museum was great – very contemporary. The two main exhibits going on were of works by Olafur Eliasson, which blew consistently confused us and our eyes (in a good way), and by R. Buckminster Fuller, which made us wish we lived in pod houses.

Next we walked down to Millennium Park to enjoy the sun and plot our next step. We decided that we needed to have deep-dish pizza, which – though you would think it would be easy to find in Chicago – took us a lot more walking to get to. We figured that meant we could eat more pizza.

The pizza was delicious and we took a meandering walk along the lakefront to digest. When we ended up at the Field Museum, we found out that it was free admission day (!!!) and we headed in. We were there until the museum closed and we still didn’t even get to half of it – we will have to return some day.

After another long walk and bus ride back to the car, we headed off to Wisconsin. There was surprisingly little traffic coming out of Chicago, since we were only catching the tail end of rush our. The two-hour drive went by in a flash. Nearing Norm and Diane’s house (Emily’s brother’s in-laws) Louisa saw that longest building she’d ever seen, as well as the most trucks in one place – all at a Target shipping facility or something of the sort. Unfortunately, as she stared out the window with her mouth gaping open, Emily was talking obliviously on the phone and missed the whole thing, which she will forever regret.