A Weekend in the City

This weekend was Arthur's 4-day mid-semester break, so we headed off to Chicago for a couple of days to visit a friend.

It was just what the doctor ordered. A sense of the familiar - hanging out playing Dominion with a friend - combined with a busy city and its hallmarks.

The drive there on Friday afternoon was gorgeous. It did me wonders to revel in the foliage along the highway - almost enough to ignore the flatness of the Midwest ;) It's hard to be away from New England in October, but this helped immensely.

Arthur was happy from the moment he started seeing commuter rail in Indiana. He's studying to be a transportation planner, and not being near a metro is unnatural!

Also, the Lake is big enough to have waves. (This is still quite strange to me.) Waves are good. He managed a walk by the waves on Sunday between bouts of rain. I was happy to see waves. Not as happy as I would be to see a godforsaken MOUNTAIN, but it'll do (for now).

I think I finally put my finger on why the shores of Lake Michigan around Chicago bother me so much - the beaches feel like lake beaches. There is nothing wrong with lake beaches. I grew up going to lake beaches. But they're lake beaches with an oceanic perspective - I can't see the other shores. So it feels like it should be an ocean beach. Thus the features of a lake beach (as defined by type of  trees and grass etc.) feel out of place next to what my mind perceives to be an ocean. Ocean shores - at least to an East Coast gal - should be sandy, riddled with lines of horrible seaweed, punctuated by small shrubs and shells and crabs, and let's not forget the erosion issues.

This is generally true of most of the Great Lake coasts we've stumbled across so far. I think Toronto was better - we were on an island that felt properly beach-like. Also, we could see opposite shores. I guess we'll just have to visit all the Great Lakes and see for ourselves!

Another perk of the trip was the ability to grocery shop in a Hispanic neighborhood. So so so happy! In fact, we managed to solve most of our shopping gaps while in Chicago. Heck, we definitely addressed the peanut butter problem - with options.

What's great about a 4-day weekend is that we can spend half of it in Chicago, and still have a full weekend when we return. It really feels great to turn the "Chicago is as close as NYC" [is to Boston] into subjective knowledge rather than just objective knowledge. And a weekend with Lisa is always a blast - like living in the Buffy musical.


I wanted to send Neffie a postcard, but we weren't in particularly touristy areas. Instead, we took a bunch of photos for him. (I still need to edit them, though.)