Charming Chicago

About a month ago, Adam and I made an impromptu trip to Chicago to spend a few days with one of my oldest friends!  Meredith and I met in 8th grade English when we were seated alphabetically and she was assigned to the seat behind me.  She was one of the attendants in our wedding having made the long drive home to Schuylkill County from Chicago, IL!  Adam had a few days to use away from work so the day after our friend, Shelly, left our house we opted to drive to Chicago on a Monday night and return on a Thursday afternoon one week in mid July.  We stopped for dinner in South Bend not far from Notre Dame but it was too dark to see anything on campus.  During the second leg of the journey, we were treated to some spectacular mid-west lightning displays as we drove through the storms.  This trip marked my second time in the city and Adam's first trek to Chicago.  On our first day full day we enjoyed walking around Naperville and taking in the sights of the downtown area after meeting Meredith's husband, Joe, for lunch at a yummy little Mexican restaurant.  The tacos were really good! 

Look, Dick Tracy!

This bridge reminded me of the bridge at Knoebel's.  :)

SO yummy!!!

On the way back to the house, Meredith swung by Trader Joe's so I could have my first Trader Joe's shopping experience!!  What a cute store this was!  I can see why there are so many fans.  I picked up this candy bar for dessert that night.  I wondered if it would remind me of the Maryland Candy Bar I tried at a winery a few years back that was SO good.  That particular candy bar was white chocolate with nuts and Old Bay sprinkled on it.  Well, it was so much better than this particular candy bar.  This one was way too spicy for me and made me cough a lot but Adam liked it.  It even popped in your mouth like the Pop Rocks we had as kids.

 After a delicious dinner of BBQ pork pizza made from scratch and playing with Mere and Joe's adorable little boys us grownups played a couple rounds of the game, Sequence, and ate delicious desserts.

Oh my word...these cupcakes were to die for....SO good!!!!!  Something else that was so yummy was the macaroni salad Mere made for us using a recipe from back home.  Seriously, I ate some for nearly every meal I was there at their house.  Mmmm!  It is my all time favorite macaroni salad (and I don't even eat macaroni salad all that much) and I could eat it every day for the rest of my life.  Ha!  Meredith, I need the recipe!  :)

On Wedneday, Mere drove us into the city where we enjoyed walking around Millennium Park, grabbing some caramel/cheddar popcorn from Garrett's, seeing the Married with Children fountain, and walking along the shore of Lake Michigan (Adam's second Great Lake!).  We also ate lunch at this fabulous Italian restaurant in the Little Italy section of Chicago.  The decor and atmosphere were perfectly charming and I could only eat half of my meatball sub for the meatballs were larger than my fist...well, not really but they were super big!  We also picked up some donuts for dessert that night on the way out of the city and enjoyed the view of the ballpark as we drove by it.

Married with Children statue   ; )

Trying to get a picture with the statue without much luck...lol!

 

Beaches in the city of Chicago!!

 

On the way home, Mere dropped us off at the mall near where she and Joe got married and where we met up with a friend formerly from PA but now living in IL where she is from at Cheesecake Factory.  It was great chatting with Jenny.  Ironically, she had just returned to IL from a trip to PA and had seen some of my good friends a few days prior to getting together with us.  After saying goodbye to Jenny, Adam and I browsed a bit in the shops and were able to find a replacement bracelet for my St. Francis charm that had broken earlier in the week.

The next day, we said goodbye to Mere and got started with the trip back to Ohio.  As we pulled in for a meal somewhere near the Ohio border, Adam got a call from work.  They offered him a promotion and we learned he would be flying to Atlanta for training within the next two weeks.  We found it humorous that he was offered the job in the parking lot as we were about to enter Cracker Barrel considering I was offered my current job as he and I were in a parking lot in Califonia about to get lunch from Del Taco.  Guess this is a tradition for us now?!