Honeymoon Day II, Exploring Chicago!

So we woke up today and decided we would get a couple of things handled (including booking the very last night of our trip in San Francisco!)

After that, we decided that it was time that we checked out Navy Pier.  Conor was particularly excited because it's supposed to be Chicago's biggest tourist traps, and for whatever reason, she loves tourist traps. Navy Pier was cool, albeit a little weird and empty in the winter.  We both imagined in the Summer that it would be a pretty active place.

We decided to swing by Shake Shack on our way back to the room and get some delicious burgers and a couple of beers to start the day off right!  If you haven't had Shake Shack before, what are you doing, you should, it's amazing.

On the way back to our hotel room, we picked up a bottle of Yellowtail wine to celebrate because today was Australia Day!

So naturally, we throw on Triple J's Hottest 100, eat some Maltesers, and had some wine in our room while enjoying our view of Lake Michigan.  After that, Conor's dad was nice enough to buy us tickets to go to the top of the Sears Tower for Christmas!  For those that don't know, the Sears Tower was the tallest building in the world (108 floors!) for nearly 25 years, and is still the tallest building in the United States (not including antenna's).

We got our Uber to the Sears Tower and took the elevators all the way to the top, with our ears popping a tremendous amount.  When we got out we could see an amazing view of Lake Michigan, The Hancock Building, and all of Chicago.  There was even a place where you could go stand off the side of the building with a glass floor.  I (Ryan) kept jumping on it as hard as I could, Conor was not so impressed.  After that, and after someone gave Conor a sweet keyring, we left there and decided to go to the Art Institute.

Luckily, there was a pedi-cab right outside, who said that $13 would be fine to take us to the Art Institute.  As it was lightly snowing at this point, and since we both had always wanted to take a pedi-cab, we decided we should do it!  Our pedi-cab driver was super nice, and really helped us understand a bit more about the city, including some architecture tidbits and cool filming locations we might have seen from movies, like the City Hall in The Dark Knight!

Once we got to the Art Institute we started taking a look around. We arrived there a bit late, and I am not the most knowledgable about art, so we would need to get on track fast!  Luckily, we took some screen shots from Ferris Bueler's Day Off of when they went to the Art Institute, so we could at least make sure we saw some of those (and maybe make some funny posed pictures like in the movie).

It wasn't long before we understood why the Art Institute has such a reputation for being an amazing museum.  Conor's top three Art Museum's are now: The Guggenheim in Bilbao, MONA in Hobart, and The Art Institute in Chicago. It's spectacular. We could have spent hours there, and there was just so much to see and love. We saw amazing paintings by Dali, Van Gogh, Monet, Picasso, Magritte, Renoir, and so many more; a truly priceless collection of art.

We were pretty exhausted after the Art Institute so we decided to head back to our hotel, grab some Uber Eats, watch Ferris Bueller's Day Off (naturally) and Skype Party with Colin for a little bit.

After talking with Colin for a bit, we got our second wind and decided we should probably go out!  We went out searching for Billy Goats Tavern, in hopes of learning more about the recently broken Curse of the Billy Goat, but for some reason, we just couldn't make sense of the address (turns out the location we were going to was below ground level).

After a little bit we found a really cool area near downtown to have some local beers before making the trek back to our hotel for the night.

All in all, a day very well spent!