Nellie's travels: September 2011

We have been here now for 7 weeks. Time seems to have changed…instead of the usual 60 minutes per hour, I think it’s changed to about 20. Every day I seem to lose the hours between 9:00am and 4:00pm. I’m not sure what’s happening to those hours, but they certainly go by fast!

Yesterday we stopped at Hot Doug’s for lunch. It was written up as the best hot dog in Chicago. (I have now been to 2 of the top 3 places, and I haven’t gotten an actual hot dog yet. Maybe if I liked hot dogs…..) We had a grilled bratwurst with carmelized onions – a good brat. We weren’t adventurous enough to try the daily specials – one was a truffle dog, made with duck sausage, white truffles, etc., for $7.50, which isn’t bad, when you consider that truffles sell for about $120 a pound. Somehow, making a hot dog out of a truffle seems wrong to me. Douglas (my son, not the owner of Hot Doug’s) tells me, though, that Hot Doug’s duck fat French fries are wonderful…..they are sold only on Fridays and Saturdays, so maybe tomorrow I’ll walk up and give them a try.

I’ve been thinking about driving in the big city, especially as I learn how to navigate Chicago (as long as I stay out of the Loop – downtown). Generally, this is a pretty easy place to get around, as it’s laid out in an east-west, north-south grid (except for a few streets – more on that later). You just have to remember which direction you’re heading. It isn’t as easy as it is at home, where you know you’re heading east if the Cascade mountains are in front of you, or north if Puget Sound is on your left. Those are pretty big land(or water) marks. Here, of course, you have Lake Michigan, but you can’t see it unless you’re next to it, due to the size of the buildings….and, if you are facing all those tall buildings you should be headed east, but the city is huge, so those tall buildings MIGHT actually be south or north, not east. Makes it hard for us out-of-towners.

There are exceptions to the street grid thing, though. (This is something that Chicagoans downplay a lot. They like to think that their city is as easy a place to find your way around as a two-street town in Nebraska. They’re wrong.) There are some streets that do not follow the grid (Elston, Clybourn, Milwaukee, Lincoln) – instead, they are diagonal, heading northwest-southeast, parallel to highway 90 (aka The Kennedy Expressway). Three of those – Elston, Clybourn and Milwaukee – are major streets. This means that they intersect with two other streets at all large intersections. For example, Elston meets Diversey (a few blocks from Becky’s) at the same place that Western Avenue meets Diversey, making a 6-point intersection. Remember, they do not have many left-turn arrows in this city (I have no idea why that is). So, if you are on Elston and you need to turn left on to Diversey (which we do almost daily), you have to be careful, because if you turn left a little too soon, you will be on Western, NOT Diversey…..so we have taken to giving directions as “take a “soft” left as opposed to a “hard” left…Again, keeping in mind that there are no turn arrows, this means that everyone and their brother turns left on red lights here. So, while the urge to GO as soon as the light turns green (especially if you are a little late picking up a kid from school), you don’t dare – because there are at least 2 cars and a truck that are still in the intersection, turning left. It makes things very confused. Also, you need to factor in all the bicyclists. They abound here, where cars and parking cost a LOT. Now, at home, in oh-so-proper Seattle (my tongue is firmly in my cheek), bicyclists follow the same rules of the road as cars. Here, there’s a very laissez-faire view of biking – they go through red lights, ride on the wrong side of the road, head straight into the intersection on a red light and then ride like hell as soon as they get a chance…..and don’t even get me started about their tendency to pass cars on the left while the car is in the left-turn lane. I’m getting better at driving around but by the time I get confident on any roads other than Elston and Clybourn (I know those 2 roads) we’ll be leaving to come home, and I’ll forget it all before I come back. C’est la vie.

We spent Labor Day at Cantigny, which is a park/memorial to the 1st Armored Division, US Army. It was a gift to the city of Chicago by the McCormick family (big ol' name in these parts - lots of buildings, streets, etc. named for them) in honor of Robert R. McCormick, who captained the 1st Armored in WWI. His biggest victory, apparently, was at Cantigny. Cantigny was the first major offensive of WWI and took place on May 28, 1918. The park is about 500 acres and contains two museums (one is the home of the McCormicks and the other is a war memorial), several different gardens and a "tank park." Okay, tell it like it is, it pretty much glorifies war and killing people. However, the tanks - I think there were about 12 or so - are all sitting around for the kids to climb all over them. They had a great time.

Don't you wish you were this nimble? Miles has long legs!

We took a picnic lunch and just sat and enjoyed the day....notice the sweatshirts and jackets. This is Chicago, on September 5th! It's normally about 80 degrees....felt like home.