Celebrating in Chicago

For Ryan's birthday, I took him to Chicago to celebrate. It was about a five hour drive, so we left late morning on Saturday and got there early that night. I had gotten lots of suggestions from good friends about what we should do in Chicago and where we should eat.

We stayed at the Palmer House Hilton, which I booked on Priceline.com and got a wonderful deal. (There's a place on the website where you can enter where you want to stay, including where in the city, what you want to pay and whether you want a 2-4 star hotel. You enter the price you want to pay and it searches to see if any hotels will accept that price. No one accepted our initial price, but our next offer worked out.)

That night, we walked around the streets of Chicago (bundled up in our winterwear) and ate dinner at Giordano's, which is a restaurant famous for it's Chicago-style pizza. It was so good, and we were stuffed! After dinner, we walked back to our hotel, where we ordered dessert from room service and opened Ryan's presents. The streets were beautifully lit with white Christmas lights and we even saw an ice sculpture (you don't find those outside in Texas!)

On Sunday, we ate breakfast, and then walked down the Magnificent Mile (a long strip of stores, restaurants and malls). It was cold again, but still no rain or snow. We ate a small lunch and then headed back to the hotel to change into nicer clothes.

I hadn't told Ryan, but I surprised him with tickets to the Broadway show Wicked. It's the story about how the witches in The Wizard of Oz became good and evil. We loved it! It was so much fun!

After Wicked, we had dinner at the Signature Room, which is on the 95th floor of the John Hancock Building. It was a beautiful view of the city, and the food was wonderful. Ryan even got a special dessert since we were celebrating his birthday.

When we finished with dinner, it was raining pretty hard, so we decided to take a cab to the hotel, instead of walking a mile and a half and getting drenched.

On Monday morning, we ate at a fantastic restaurant called the Orange Restaurant or something like that. Ryan ordered Green Eggs and Ham, and I had Cinnamon Roll Pancakes. It was so good, and we were extremely full. It started snowing while we ate breakfast and continued the rest of the day.

We gathered our stuff back at the hotel, checked it with the bellhop and ventured out to enjoy our snowy Chicago day. We first headed to Buckingham Fountain, which I'm sure is more beautiful when the water is actually on. You can notice the lack of water in the background of this picture. We walked around the city in the snow, loving every minute of it. That is except for the fact that somehow my feet were soaked.

We went to Gino's East for lunch, which is a rival for the Best Chicago Pizza. It was incredible. I know I've said that a lot, but Chicago has great food. We walked around a little bit and headed to Ghiradelli's for some hot chocolate and a cookie sundae. It was terrific as well, especially for sweet treats lovers like us!

It was getting late, so we took a cab back to the hotel, loaded our car, ran a quick errand and headed out of town. It was snowing pretty bad at least half of the way home, but we made good time and got home safely.