Anyways, after a wonderful night's sleep in the most amazing Motel 6 of all time, we arose, packed our bags, and headed down the road to Cedar Point. Cedar Point is a big amusement park on the shores of Lake Erie. For roller coaster enthusiests, this place is Mecca. They have big coasters, and bigger coasters, and short fast coasters, and long tall coasters. Along with these coasters came lines. Looooooong lines. 2 hours for the first coaster. And it spiralled from there. Over the, what, 8 hours we spent in the park, I think Dustin got on 6 rides. I got on like 4, and then bailed and went to the beach!
The waters of Lake Erie were super warm. Awesome. And it was a gorgeous beach. I thoroughly enjoyed my decision to be a beach bum for the last few hours of the Cedar Point day while Dustin wanted to get on a few last roller coasters. Around 6 or so we headed back to the car and started driving West towards South Bend, where we would crash for the night. And the sky was beautiful along the highway, leading us towards our destination.
After a decent night's sleep at the Motel 6 in South Bend, the goal for the next day would take us to a few spots in Indiana, and then back to Evanston and Chicago for a ChiSox game and one last night spent at Jackie's pad. First on our agenda was a quick stop over at the University of Notre Dame. Notre Dame is famous, especially to a college football fan like me, so being around the stadium was pretty cool. The campus is very nice...probably the nicest part of the entire state of Indiana. We wandered around the football stadium, took some pictures of the statues around the stadium of their past coaches, and, of course, took pictures of Touchdown Jesus.
After about 30 minutes wandering around Notre Dame it was time to hit the road. The next stop was Indiana Dunes National Lakeshore. This is the big beachy lakeshore on Lake Michigan, and really one of the only fun things to do in Indiana. Well, other than talk about corn.
Epic corn shot! Anyways, through the cornfields and over to the lake we went. When we got there, we had a choice to make: either get in our swim trunks and spend half a day swimming, or just go check out the lakeshore and then keep treking towards Chicago. We chose the latter, because we wanted to get into Evanston at a reasonable afternoon time. Too bad, though. It was a really nice beach, plenty of beach bunnies, and it was such a hot and muggy day that swimming in the lake would have been really nice. Maybe next time. We hung out at the lakeshore for about 20 minutes or so, and then it was off to our next stop: Michael Jackson's childhood home in Gary, IN.
Gary is a shithole. I wish there was a classier way to describe it, but there is not. Shithole is literally the best possible word to describe that city. As Dustin put it, "it looks like multiple bombs went off all over town," and that was pretty apt. I mean, between the burned out buildings, the shitty, falling apart houses, broken windows, and awful roads...I mean, we could have been in a warzone and not known it. Brutal. There was one small area in Gary, however, that was not a shithole...and that was MJ's house!
Gary clearly took pride that the Jacksons used to live there, and had redone the MJ house to look very nice, with nice grass and the house was all painted and gated off. It was actually a nice little tribute to him.
At the house there was also a marble tribute to him at the house that was very nice. And the No Parking sign in front of the house was covered in signatures of people who came by to pay their respects. All in all, it was a very nice stop. I mean, I'm a huge MJ fan. Love his music, love his music videos, and really wish I had gotten to see him in concert, as they appeared to be epic. So this was pretty cool. After that it was time to get the hell out of Gary and back to Evanston.
This time driving through Chicago was rather quick. No flooding to close the freeway. Yay! So we got back to Jackie's and dropped off our stuff and hung out for a bit (we had like an hour to relax). Then we walked over to the train station and jumped on the train into Chicago. An hour later (seriously) we were at U.S. Cellular Field for our 6th baseball game in 6 days (in 5 states...this was the only repeat state game). Yay!
And our seats at this game were probably our best of the whole trip. We were about 12 rows off the visitors' dugout. Awesome! It gave me pretty clutch shots of Ichiro (my favorite player in baseball right now). It also gave me pretty clutch shots of the in game action. Like this catch of Konerko's HR ball crossing just fair down the line!
And of Konerko running the bases while fireworks celebrated his feat!
Almost every park we went to had fireworks to celebrate home runs and victories for the home team. Wrigley did not, but its still awesome in a baseball history sense. U.S. Cellular is a very nice park. If anything, this trip reminded me how awful Oakland's park is. I'm pretty convinced now that, given a nice stadium that people will enjoy going to, the A's attendance would at least double, maybe triple. It's really important that they get a new ballpark, and soon. The game was enjoyable. Seattle jumped out to a 5-1 lead after 2 innings, and then the Sox fought back with solo home run after solo home run, and ended up winning 6-5. Bobby Jenks closed out the 9th with three strikeouts. Awesome! And just like that, our baseball adventure was over!
But the trip was not yet done. After one last night's sleep in Evanston, we got up the next morning, packed up the car, thanked Jackie for her hospitality, and took the train into Chicago one last time. We had about half a day to kill before we needed to head up to Milwaukee to catch our flight. We decided to hit the Field museum, and that was a good choice. They had ton's of early man and native american artifacts, some animals skins, and, of course, Sue:
This is one of I think two full T-Rex skeletons unearthed. And this one is in the Field Museum in Chicago. Pretty cool. The Field Museum is really large, and we only had about 2 hours there...so we didn't see nearly everything. At all. I'm going to need to go back. Really, I just need to go back to Chicago and spend like 4 or 5 days there really seeing everything. After the Field Museum, we went back for one last deep dish pizza lunch at Giordano's. And this time my buddy Kyle (who had just finished the bar exam, yay!), his girlfriend Laura, and Laura's little sister who had just gotten into today all joined us. Pretty awesome! It was nice to see Kyle one last time, and cool to meet his girlfriend, who seemed like cool people.
After that it was a trainride back to Evanston, and then driving up to Milwaukee. Unfortunately, even though it was 3pm, there was mad traffic between Chicago and Milwaukee. That's because like the entire freeway was under construction. Awesome. Needless to say, it took us over 2 hours to get to the rental car dropoff, which was in downtown Milwaukee, and not really that close to the airport. We finally flagged down a cab, and told him, our flight leaves in 1 hour, 20 minutes, we need to get there and check bags in, and the freeway is complete jammed up. Can you get us there quickly not using the freeway? The cabbie replies with "well, we'll have to be a little crazy, but let's do this!" Alleyways, side streets, U Turns to avoid lights, every trick in the book was used. And all of a sudden, we were approaching the airport! And it had only taken 20 minutes on surface streets! Clutch cab driving!
We get into the airport, get checked in, tag our bags to be checked, leave them with the TSA scanner, and head to security. Security was slow because there were people in front of us who clearly had never flown before. Ugh. And then our gate was literally the furthest one from security. Awesome. Needless to say, we showed up right as they were beginning to board.
So, yeah, we made the airplane, our bags did too, and we had a nice, comfortable, direct flight home on Frontier Airlines to San Francisco. The plane offered live DirecTV for only 6 bucks, so I couldn't turn that down. I got to watch the brand new Futurama for that night, the rerun of the previous night's Tosh.0, and some live baseball! Awesome! Made the flight go by super fast. Got into SFO on time, got our bags, and Dustin's friend gave us a ride back to Campbell.
All in all, this was an amazing trip. Probably one of the more insane, on the move, see everything vacations I've ever been on...but seriously, how often do you get to do a trip like this...6 ballparks, 5 states, the pro football hall of fame, rock n roll hall of fame, notre dame, an amusement park, MJs house, Pittsburgh and all it's awesomeness, and a few days in Chicago. It was an awesome trip...and I was very happy to have an entire weekend to sleep before heading back to work this week.
3 comments:
Great posts, bro. I should just link yours on my blog and save myself the effort of reinventing the wheel ;-)
Haha, feel free to do so...
nice work! Seems like a great trip!
JMB
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