Day 4: Chicago

Wrigley Field in Chicago

The first couple stops on the trip were places I’ve been before (Pittsburgh, PNC Park, and Cedar Point), but today really started the newer part of my adventure. Until I get to Vegas in two weeks, I haven’t been to any of our next locations. We had a full day in Chicago planned, so this was going to be one of the few light driving days on the trip.

We set our alarm for 9 am, got ready, and since there is no free breakfast at this hotel, we made a quick stop at McDonalds around the block on the way to the L station. Our hotel is on the outskirts of Chicago, so we knew it was going to take over an hour to get in the vicinity of Wrigley Field. We took the blue line most of the way, and then switched to the red line for a few more stops before getting off by the ballpark. Having spent most of my time as a baseball fan either at Met games or Nats games, where both teams play at stadiums surrounded by parking lots and not much else, I was immediately impressed by the area around the ballpark, which was a large selection of bars, restaurants, and other shops, and there were huge crowds of people decked out in Cubs gear ready to party. We walked around a little bit, before settling on Bernie’s for a few pregame beers.

We had bought our seats in advance, and they ended up being really good. There are a lot of parts of the park which have limited visibility, but ours (section 523, a little to first base side of home plate, in the upper deck) had a great view and were in the shade the entire game. I enjoyed the throwback style of Wrigley Field, which still has a mostly manual scoreboard, very few electronics around the park, or other distractions common in newer ballparks. The game went by very quick, clocking in a little over 2.5 hours, the weather was perfect, and we saw the second Reds win of our road trip, this one a 3-0 victory.

After the game we went back to Bernie’s, and met up with two more of Allen’s Citrix coworkers for some more drinks, and I started to form the opinion that Chicago might be the drunkest city I’ve ever been in. Over the next couple hours (still mid afternoon on a weekday) we were entertained by the random girl who wouldn’t stop trying to dance with every person that walked past her, even though no one else was dancing. Later in the afternoon we also saw two random drunk old men get into a loud verbal fight, and what seemed like a young couple who worked together get into a fight of their own, with the girl yelling to the guy “If you want to fire me I don’t care!” and storming out of the bar. We stayed at Bernie’s for a little while and eventually moved down the street to Uberstein, a German style bar for some bratwurst, uberpretzels, and liter size beers. After that we met up with a few other Citrix peoples, who kept the makeshift Chicago bar crawl going, including stops at Elephant & Castle and Boss. I don’t really remember what we did at any of them, but I’m sure we had fun. And on another positive note, Allen, who has been suffering from some mild insomnia on the trip finally, found a place to get some rest. Luckily we didn’t have to switch trains on the way back, but it was another long trip back to the hotel, and we got in around 2 am.



Miles traveled today: 26

Miles traveled total: 977
States passed through so far: 6