Day 11 - Ever Heard of Guster? Me Neither.

Today was our first full day (of 3) in Chicago. But before I give the run-down of today, here are some "action" shots from yesterday's fun at the Field of Dreams:

We started the day around 11 by driving 10 minutes from Marti & John's house to the owner of Pen At Hand's (Ronnie Horowitz) house in Northbrook, where she runs her business. Debbie had met the owner a bunch of times, but not her assistant, so she was excited to meet her and see how they processed all of the orders. Ronnie has a very large home office (at least compared to ours) and a large staging area for her products that are ready to ship. However, it's not nearly as organized or sophisticated a process as we thought it might be. It's certainly efficient, as they have a place and system for everything, but I guess we were just expecting a more streamlined set-up.

Debbie brought an actual order with her, so we could see how an order form goes from our office to a finished product. Again, not nearly as complicated as we thought it might be. Lots of cutting and pasting and manipulating by hand. But again, it works. Debbie had ordered stick figure bag tags for the kids, and had told Ronnie we would just pick them up when we got there, so we got those and Ronnie was also nice enough to make a little dry-erase activity thing-a-ma-bob (don't know what to call it) for Amanda.

We left Pen At Hand around 12:15 or so, and headed towards Wrigley. The Cubs are not in town, so they had tours every 30 minutes. We got to Wrigley in about an hour, found a place to park on the street and headed for the park. It was about 1:30 and the kids were hungry, so we bought the tickets for the 2:30 tour and went for a quick lunch at the Capt. Morgan Restaurant that is part of Wrigley. The selling point for this place was that our ticket stubs got us 30% off the bill. I think that was the highlight of the lunch.

We finished about 10 minutes before the start of the tour, then headed over to the gate where the tours began. At 2:30 we started the tour by watching a short DVD on Wrigley and the Cubs. Stunningly, there was not much on the Cubs or their successes over the many years at Wrigley, for obvious reasons.

The stadium is close to Fenway in its coziness and size. I am sure you will be just STUNNED to know that I like the look and feel of Fenway more. Wrigley is the 2nd oldest stadium in use (built in 1914, behind Fenway's 1912) and the next oldest is Dodger Stadium, which was built in the 60's. We went to the right field bleachers, then to the mezzanine suites behind home plate, the press level, the visitors' locker room, the Cubs locker room and finally onto the field and the visitors' dugout.

The tour lasted until about 4:15, then we hit the local souvenir shop for some more useless and unnecessary spending, and decided to stop by the nearby storefront of one of Debbie's competitors. This company is actually owned and operated by a fraternity brother of mine (I think 2 years younger) and his wife, Jay and Cindy Rudman. I had spoken with Jay a few years ago to compare notes on the industry, and Debbie and I met Cindy at the latest Stationery Show. Cindy had called Debbie a few weeks ago just to check in, and Debbie mentioned that we would be in Chicago, and Cindy invited us to stop by. So, this was not a covert operation to spy on the enemy. This was a friendly get together.

They have a lovely store and we stayed there just long enough for the kids to get restless and start goofing off to the point that we were afraid they would take down some displays with their fooling around, and then we left around 5:00.

We decided to venture to the Lincoln Park Zoo near downtown. The appeal for this place was two-fold. One, we had not checked out any zoos in any of the cities we have visited. And two, it's free. We got to the zoo and miraculously found parking on the street right near the entrance. We headed for the entrance and saw a long, curious line near the entrance. Being that it was almost closing time (7 pm) and free, this confused us. We reached the end of the line and asked someone if this was the line for the zoo. Much like the look we got in Memphis when we asked for bottled water, the woman looked at us and said, "No, this is the line for the Guster concert. The zoo closed at 5 today." Seriously, she looked at us like we were aliens for not knowing that the Superband Guster was playing that night. Quick, name a Guster song (without using Google or any similar source). Exactly.

We were all disappointed, as you can see (I will let you figure out which tears are real):

We hung out there for a short time, long enough for Debbie to torture the kids by making them take pictures next to some flowers. Then we headed further into town and to the Navy Pier, Chicago's answer to the South Street Seaport. The Navy Pier was packed, as the Tall Ships were in town. We passed on spending about $70 to get a close-up view of the ships, as the kids were getting hungry and we were wary of mimicking the excitement of the Country Music Hall of Fame. So we picked a place to eat on the Pier, and ended up with a nice view of many Tall Ships that sailed by. We ended the evening with a typical Chicago dessert - Haagen Dazs, and headed back to Glencoe for the night.

Tomorrow on the agenda are another try at the Zoo, a hands-on museum that everyone raves about (can't remember the name right now) and, drum roll please, the American Girl Store. I can't tell you how excited the boys are to be going there, knowing how much Amanda will enjoy it. The look on their faces when we told the boys we were going there tomorrow would make any parent proud, because they know how important it is to Amanda and are ready to be so selfless with their time and are going there with such a good attitude.

And if you believe that crap about the boys, I have a bridge over Lake Michigan I can sell you.