Sweet Home Chicago

Well, it was a fantastic trip! We had a great time in the Windy City visiting everyone and enjoying Chicago and its neighbors. Below are some pictures, as promised, of our trip. I hope you enjoy!

My mom and dad hosted a party for the entire family at our church, St. Thomas More. Here you can see them stringing up a pinata, while Jamie, my brother's second oldest daughter gets ready to go buck.

Because my heritage is from the South Side, I tried to take some some less glamorous but nevertheless interesting photos of this area. Above are two smoke stacks on the lake belonging to one of the local mills. These mark the beginning of mile upon miles of steel mills from South Chicago to Gary (if you continued to the right) on the lakeshore. Of personal significance, these towers were often my guiding beacon back to port when I was driving the fishing boat back to the dock from all areas of the lake.
This is a cool shot. I decided to drive right through the South Side (read "ghetto") on our way to the museum. What you see are three major bridges, going over the Joliet river, which opens up into lake Michigan.

In the background is the Skyway, which is a quick shot into the southern area of Chicago, terminating at the Dan Ryan. We were docked just on the otherside of the Skyway. As a side note, my dad worked on that bridge back in the day.

The second bridge, the one with spindles off to the left, is the train bridge. This thing is massive and sorta spellbinding upclose. My guess is that it must have been built in the 20's or so, because it has the period look. Miyazaki could probably write an entire story around this thing. It lowers for various trains to go across the river and is still in use. I found this out the hard way when I was sitting on the bow and a train decided to release the juice in it's foghorn in the mini canyon that forms between river and its two walls.

The third bridge is the second of three bridges that take you to the southside.

Above is the 95th Street Bridge, just like in the movie Blues Brothers. This is the actual bridge they jump, and it just happened to be up when we got there. It's the last street bridge before you get to the lake!

Finally, this is the last train bridge, a little more conventional before you get to the lake. You can see the tug pushing out a barge. Classic.

I would have posted more pics in this post, but Blogger restricted me.

I hope you dig. Gotta juice for now. More pics to come.