Out and About

It's been a while since the last post. I was waiting for Grace to make a post before I did more, but she's been too busy with school to find time (a good problem I guess) so for the time being I'll just assume the role of poster for us both.

We've had a few weekends with visitors which has given us an opportunity to do more exploring around Chicago. I'll try to recap some of the highlights of our excursions.

North side
While we love the Hyde Park area, we've come to realize that a lot of our friends and places we want to see are on the North side. A few weeks before classes started Grace found a bunch of great second-hand stores on the north side and did a little school clothes shopping. During this trip Grace and I met up with an old friend of mine who recently moved to Chicago, we ended up meeting at the Lincoln Park Zoo.

For being a free zoo (minus the parking, $$$) I was really impressed, we will definitely be back when the weather is warmer and more animals are out. You can see the rest of the pictures from the zoo here. We've found a lot of great places on the north side; some great beer bars and restaurants, a pet store that specializes in tiny dogs (this might be Grace's favorite), and a cool little three-story house turned coffee shop. We're excited to share some of these places with visitors.

Museum Passport
The greatest Chicago discovery we made so far was not actually a place, but a library program that Grace found out about through a co-worker. The program allows Chicago Public Library members to check out a "museum passport" that gets 2-4 people free or heavily discounted admission to all of the classic Chicago museums. We gave this a try a few weekends ago with some family in town and visited the Shedd Aquarium for half the ticket price! This was my first trip to the Shedd and I was blown away, I went crazy taking pictures and video.



We will be using these a lot with future visitors to see all of the great museums in Chicago!