Chicago Day 5

Today was a full conference day. It started out with two fantastic speakers, Lisa Bodell, and Diana Nyad. They were both great! Diana was the one that swam from Cube to Florida. She is fascinating to listen to. We then scored our Garrett's popcorn! We had a meeting with Apartments.com, went to two classes and ate lunch. We had another general session speaker, Brian Fanzo. He was good but I wasn't as engaged. We then parted ways for more classes. Mine was incredibly boring so I played with my food.  We met up for the last class and it was great!

After the conference we met up with six people for dinner, Paul, Peter, Jean, DJ, Tonya, and Ryan. The food was excellent! The table shared the fried chicken for an appetizer. It was so good! We ordered the hamburger and fish and chips to share so we could try both. The flavor combinations of their food was perfection. Then we started our great walking tour.

Paul was walking us all over the place. First we went to the bean, then a really cool fountain. We saw the Jay Pritzker Amphitheater. He showed us a beautiful neighborhood around a park that now has 20,000 people living in it and it used to be a 9 hole golf course.

 

We were bobbing and weaving all the over the place! We finally got to a point that we had to open a gate and ended up in backyards and the only way out was to jump the fence.  It was hilarious to see all of us middle age folks getting over that fence, or climbing a tree. I wish I had been recording!

We finally made it to the Navy Pier for the fireworks. They were wonderful and the music perfectly timed.

We grabbed delicious dessert on the pier and then made our way back to the hotel in a much more direct route. 

It was such a fun night with really fun people and the adventure on the indirect route and jumping the fence is what made it so fun. I loved getting to know Tonya and Peter's stories.

When we got back to the hotel, the old school Chicago cars rolled up with tunes booming. They were awesome.

Due to adventure of it all, I'm counting it as my Chicago "hike" since there really isn't hiking anywhere close to where we are. We actually did closer to 6.5 miles but I forgot to start navigation.