The Windy City Review (Very long read, Jennifer)

Growing up, I spent afternoons and summer days at my grandmother's house, most of the time watching the Cubs play to the soundtrack of Harry Caray on WGN. I used to collect the Starting Lineup baseball figurines, with my grandmother starting my collection with the replicas of Andre Dawson, Ryne Sandberg and Ernie Banks. These moments were the building blocks to my love for America's pasttime, and I have spent my entire life wanting to watch a game from inside the Friendly Confines of Wrigley Field. On Friday, July 25, 2008, I was finally able to cross this item off my Bucket List. Below is a summation of this journey to the Windy City.

Joining me on my pilgrimage was my father, who I am pretty sure had a better time than myself (which is saying something). Dad is leery of big cities, but all he could do was rant and rave about the intricacies of Chicago. We left my house Thursday morning to begin our 12-hour journey through the heartland of America. Some random observations of Illinois:

- If you are traveling up I-55 to I-57, make sure you stop to eat, fill up or any other reasons to veer off your journey before you leave Missouri. It will take you 53 miles to get to any known civilization in the Land of Lincoln, which I'm sure is a mistake made by many. It's never good when you're looking for gas stations and the GPS is telling you the closest ones are 15 miles behind you.

- Anywhere you can put corn in Illinois, there is a cornfield...including surrounding the on-ramps to the interstates and between commercial buildings. One wonders how this is harvested at rush hour, but I digress.

- They're very proud of their grain bins and silos there. The "deluxe" model of silo is painted navy blue while the "super deluxe" model also features an American flag. I was also taken aback from the variety of sizes for the grain bins.

First stop in the greater Chicagoland area was the hotel, the Courtyard Marriott by O'Hare. I can't give this place a good enough recommendation for not just location but the hotel staff. We were just over a mile from the nearest train station (Rosemont) and never had to leave the "Blue Line" L train to go anywhere in the city we wished. The complimentary shuttle took us to/from the station within 10 minutes of us asking to be picked up. The only thing that I had as a negative was no Dr. Pepper available (which is not just limited to the hotel).

Thursday night, we found the street location to the original Giordano's pizza parlor on Rush Street. The CTA staff helped us pick out the right train stop to take and where we wanted to ride the buses. The restaurant was at the corner of Rush and Michigan, and we hurridly ordered our pizza before waiting around and taking pictures outside. Now, I'm pretty sure that one of the first things my friends would say distinguishes me from everyone else would be my eating habits. I'm not one to take chances on food (something I inherited from my father, by the way), but we decided that we should attempt the "world famous" stuffed pizza. It was pretty good, something resembling lasagna with pizza toppings.

When we got back to the hotel, I could barely sleep knowing that I was within 12 hours of my first Wrigley Field experience. My goal was to make it down to Wrigleyville by 10 a.m., which required us to leave the hotel by 9:30 a.m. At 9:40 a.m., we were able to cross Addison to the Wrigley buses, where we were part of the standing-room only passenger group. I particularly enjoyed watching the interactions of the fathers and sons or daughters as some dads would tell tales of their first Cubs games. We befriended a guy named Vince, who was nice enough to tip us on when to leave the bus to avoid the mass rush of the final stop at Clarke and Addison. Vince gave us some suggestions on things to do outside the stadium before going to his job at Taco Bell. After snapping some photos of the historic marquee sign, we went into the Cubs Nostalgia Shop.

Now, I was beyond excited about being just feet from this iconic sports cathedral, but my dad took it to another level. For my souvenirs, I picked up a Ryan Theriot jersey-style t-shirt and a Wrigley Field t-shirt. Meanwhile, dad purchased an authentic Ernie Banks jersey as well as his Cubs hat. I was proud of him for such a bold purchase. After changing into our Cubs gear, we meandered around the outside while we waited on our hosts from Premier Print for lunch in the Stadium Club. We searched for Kirk's brick outside the stadium entrance, and - while we were unsuccessful in that mission - I was delighted to find Turd Ferguson's (he of SNL Celebrity Jeopardy fame) plot.

Ron LaBine and his son-in-law Dewey showed up at 11:50 at the Stadium Club entrance, and we were soon within the stadium's interior walls. The Stadium Club is a private membership featuring a full restaurant menu overlooking the right field bleachers. The pillars are painted with red baseball seams, while a circular Cubs logo is surrounded by bats and baseballs featuring the names of all Chicago's Hall of Fame players as well as a screened painting of the marquee adjacent to the bar to enhance the decor. We had a great conversation about the possible trades that were starting to fill the radio airwaves and enjoyed food from the buffet.
Premier's seats were five rows up on the third base side of the stadium, almost smack dab in the middle between the Cubs' dugout and the Cubs' bullpen. I can't begin to describe how incredible the seats were. We made it through the spill well in time to watch former Notre Dame standout wide receiver Jeff Samardjiza make his way to the bench adjacent to the pen with his pink equipment bag, signifying his rookie standing. Lucky for us, we'd be able to witness his Major League debut in the seventh inning. However, that would be getting just a little ahead of ourselves.

Chicago's starting pitcher was Ryan Dempster, who has a distinguishable windup in which he flicks his glove twice between pitches. It was found that he had been tipping his pitches to batters, so the glove flicks serve as a defense mechanism to distract the batters from his low-90s fastball. These are the kind of things you learn from the knowledgable Chicago fans at Wrigley Field. A few more observations from the Marlins' 3-2 victory over the Cubbies:

- In college, Andrew and I used to joke about Ohio State's Drew Anderson's abilities following the Auburn Regional in 2003. Hanley Ramirez makes Drew Anderson look like one of my 12-year-old all-stars. I don't think there are enough positive adjectives to describe this kid's finesse for the game of baseball. I can't say enough about him, really, and he didn't even make his most impressive plays on Friday when he was 60 feet from us.

- Samardjiza's debut more than made up for Kerry Wood being on the disabled list. It's pretty impressive to have dugout level seats and watching a guy fling a baseball over 100 miles per hour. While he has some to work to do in order to deceive batters, he's going to be very good very soon for the Cubs.

Following the game, we risked life and limb to walk upstream through the concourse in order to get to a souvenir shop to pick up some more memorabillia that we didn't want to keep up with during the game. I purchased a couple of novelty signs, my programs and some postcards to add to my growing collection of items that currently have no home in my house. (Or more items for the "library" in the future, the library being whatever space Mrs. Chris Rushing will afford me.) In any case, this stuff was pretty cool and hard to pass up.

We hopped on our bus and ended up back on the blue line at Addison Station with relative ease, and we struck up a conversation with a family from Iowa. This group was particularly interested by our Mississippi travels since the father had a stepson who played golf at Mississippi State in the last six years. The conversation helped pass along the time on the swaying train ride as we eventually returned to our starting point at Rosemont. We jumped on the shuttle and hurridly changed clothes while batteries charged for the cameras and cell phones and began to plot our course for the evening. Since the Sears Tower Skydeck shut its doors at 10 p.m., we figured it'd be best to go there before trying to find Harry Caray's for dinner.

Now, I'm not afraid of heights - it's just going up or down quickly that gets me from time-to-time. When we got off the train and saw the Sears Tower up close for the first time, I'm not going to lie - I was had a small case of cold feet. At least when you fly in a plane, it's a steady ascent into the air. The elevator took 45 seconds to get us to the 103rd floor observatory, and I'm lucky we couldn't see outside the elevator to watch the climb into the darkened Chicago sky. Dad took to his usual habit of trying to read every caption of every photo along the walls surrounding the elevator banks depicting the city's and building's history. It was a pretty impressive sight, one I can only imagine is enhanced even greater with daylight. Maybe next trip...

After being shooed out of the building by the Tower's workers, we found out that it was too late to make it to Harry Caray's in time to get something to eat, so hunger was starting to take over our systems slowly but surely. I texted Google and asked for burger recommendations in Chicago, and I noticed there were several responses on Lake St., so I suggested we depart the train at Lake Station. We crossed over lower, lower Wacker Drive (which will play a more significant role later in the story) and found Monk's Pub at the corner of Lake and Wells. Relatively hidden beneath the train tracks and roadways above, we made our way through its doors.

This is not somewhere I'd recommend ANY Chicago visitor. The burgers were pretty good, but I can only think of one time where a hamburger being more messy in my life (Robert's Cheeburger Cheeburger experience, circa 2005 Auburn graduation). They don't serve Coke products nor Pepsi products, but we were treated to the "wonderful" tastes of RC Cola. Who knew this stuff was still in mass production? Also, I can't be too sure that the food wasn't tasty due to our hunger or if it was in fact pretty good. I don't plan on revisiting to find out.

Saturday morning, we slept in a little later and headed out around 9:45 a.m. On the train ride, we sat behind a young couple who were also on their way to the ball park. Out of what I can only imagine was boredom, the girl reached into her bag and pulled out her camera and started flipping through pictures. I was caught off guard when glancing back after looking out the window to find her showing her boyfriend some "risque" pictures and immediately turned my head towards the other direction.

We got to Wrigley without any further surprises around 10:15 a.m. Since we had done all our sightseeing outside the park on Friday, we decided we'd walk around a little bit on the inside and check some of the concourse for hidden gems and photo opportunities. We wandered around for a little while and eventually found our seats perched up in Section 534. The tickets said "Limited View Possible" but they didn't portray the fact that I'd have a support beam directly between the plate and mound. Luckily, we were able to move across the stairway and sit in a pair of vacant seats next to a gentleman and his lady friend.

When we first sat down, I turned to dad and said that this guy looked just like Morgan Freeman. Whether he was or not, he at least played along and knew some pretty obscure trivia about the guy so dad felt the need to at least get his picture made with him.

While it was a bit farther from the action than our seats on Friday, I was very impressed with Rich Harden's control and velocity. He seemed to have the Marlins hitters off beat, especially considering he struck out 10 (all swinging) in five innings. Aramis Ramirez seemed like he was bursting out of his slump with two RBI in the first three innings. His solo shot to left in the third inning reached the bleachers despite the heavy winds blowing in on the playing field.

Meanwhile, Jeremy Hermida continued his tear at Wrigley with two home runs, the second to tie the game in the eighth frame, forcing extra innings in the process. In the second inning, the home plate umpire was struck by a pitch directly in the chest, forcing a delay as the men in blue switched positions and adjusted to call the rest of the game in a three-man crew instead of the usual four-man crew (a sight my dad was fascinated with due to his summer job as an umpire).

In the bottom of the ninth, Hanley Ramirez made a fantastic play to just beat out a diving Mark DeRosa at first base for the inning's second out, which caused both Cubs first base coach Matt Sinatro and manager Lou Pinella to erupt on the umpire. While Sinatro was tossed almost immediately, Pinella never seemed to lose his cool until he was informed that his day was finished a little prematurely.

This brought the scorecard of events we had witnessed in Wrigley Field to: a few web gems; a broken bat 30 feet in front of us; a bat flying into the crowd 30 feet behind us; Jeff Samardjiza's debut; three Hermida home run balls tossed back onto the field from the bleachers, including one that sailed onto Sheffield Avenue; Len Kasper and Charlie Weiss singing "Take Me Out to the Ball Game" during the seventh inning stretch; Lou Pinella getting ejected; several Cubs home runs; and a three-man umpiring crew since one ump was forced to leave the game after getting drilled with a pitch in the chest. Not a bad couple of days at the ole ball park.

In the top of the 12th, the Cubs pen faltered once again as the Marlins were finally able to push the go-ahead run across the dish. Kevin Gregg came on for his second save in as many days (which bolstered my fantasy baseball numbers in the process), and we once again left Wrigley without witnessing a Cubs win. Dad took a bathroom break before we jumped on a train to head down to Navy Pier to get some food and wait to take our sight-seeing boat ride.
We departed the train on Michigan Avenue then found out which bus to take us down to Navy Pier. On this journey, we rode right by the famous Chicago Theater (on the agenda for the next Windy City trip) and were accompanied on our near-empty bus by a couple of ladies from Columbus, Ohio. They were fast to point out their Ohio State roots, which elicited some SEC-related banter. One of the two ladies was in a wheelchair, so I felt bad saying too much (especially since I didn't know her at all). It was humorous, though, that she was shocked when she found out that Ohio State wasn't the only school which offered its coaches incentive bonuses. My dad had the best zinger of them all, though, when he said, "Just look at the bright side. Because of the SEC, you saved a ton of money as a school the last two years not having to pay the national championship bonus." They, surprisingly, did not find this amusing.

Unfortunately, the food options at Navy Pier weren't very extensive so we settled on Charley's Ale House. To keep up with the theme of the trip, we had hamburgers but at least didn't have to suffer through RC Cola this time. The atmosphere and service at Charley's was much better, and it's a good stopping point in the middle of the pier. Our only other options were Bubba Gump Shrimp Co. and The Billy Goat (which if I had known that it derived its name from the fabled curse, I would have had us eat there instead).

We walked up and down the pier for a little bit to take in the festive atmosphere as folks were just enjoying their summer Saturday evening. When we grew tired of watching a magic show, we made our way down to the loading dock for our boat ride. (Not before dad received a present from one of the many seagulls flying above. I still laugh about it thinking about the look on his face and the horrified expression on a little girl he almost slapped in his knee-jerk reaction. Priceless.)

Aside from the Wrigley Field experience, the boat tour was the best part of the trip. We left the port at 8:20 and learned of all the architecture in some of the skyscrapers lining the Chicago River and overlooking Lake Michigan. Some cool tidbits:

- Chicago has a flag for the city featuring four stars (one for the city's founding, one for the fire and two for the World's Fairs the city hosted in the 30s). Should they win their bid to host the 2016 Summer Olympics, our guide figures this would warrant the addition of a fifth star (although she and most of the boat's passengers hope it will come when the Cubs win the World Series in October).

- All of the dark alley scenes in Batman Begins were filmed on lower, lower Wacker Drive. Our guide explained that this was the roughest area of the city itself. Considering you have to cross lower, lower Wacker to get to Monk's Pub...did I mention I don't recommend this place?

- The Tribune building, the Wrigley Building and (what will be) the new Trump Building are my favorite buildings in the city. There were so many others that have significance, but I couldn't begin to name them all.

- Chicago has 52 parks because the city's main architect and planner felt that everyone should be able to get to a park within walking distance when the metropolis was rebuilt following the great fire.

- Also in his plans was to leave a view to the lake front by writing an ordinance forbidding any buildings along the Lake Michigan shore. There is only one commercial property, which happened to be right off our dock which found its loophole in building atop a landfill. The residential complex once housed Alice Cooper, Oprah and Sammy Sosa (during his Cubs playing days).

When the tour was over, we headed back to the hotel and started to pack up so we could get an quick start on Sunday's drive. Luckily, I reached into the cooler to get a drink Saturday night otherwise it would have been too late to find that my dad had tossed a couple of the bottled waters (those same $4/bottle bottled waters) from the room. Apparently, he's done this several times on previous hotel stays but at least now knows these aren't complimentary, haha. I worked on downloading pictures onto both our laptops before calling it a night (or morning, as the occasion warranted).

Sunday morning marked our departure and our return journey through the Land of Lincoln. Nothing too exciting happened along the journey aside from our stop in Broadway for breakfast at Cracker Barrell. Dad and I donned Auburn gear for the trip back, and one of the first questions we received as we sat down was, "You boys from Alabammer?" When we said we were Auburn fans from Mississippi, the esteemed local's eyes lit up with glee. "Well, boys, I just got me the Alabama 'A' tattooed on my back." (I'm not sure he knows that there's a difference between Bama and Auburn, but I will continue on with this SIX story.) When his group got up to leave, he made a sly remark (I can't even bring myself to type the words of their battle cry) to which dad and I both raised six fingers and gave a big "War Eagle!" He left the room with a confused look on his face (not sure whether he didn't know what SIX meant or if he had a hard time counting on multiple hands).

During dad's driving, I finished working through downloading the pictures before retaking control of the wheel the rest of the journey. We arrived back in Saltillo around 8:15 p.m. and it was time to return to the Real World.

Other random thoughts, etc.

- During dinner at Giordano's Thursday night, we were seated next to what I could only classify as a first date. Let's just say that this guy WAAAAY outpunted his coverage. He had on flipflops, which he immediately shook off his feet when he sat down, for crying out loud. I also overheard the woman mention her "secretary at work" - which caused me to wonder if this guy was trying to climb the corporate ladder...I love big cities.

- Don't take pictures on subway properties. I had a lady threaten to take my camera when I was getting a picture of the blue line map for archival purposes. While I knew the rule for the rest of the trip, nowhere on our tickets does it explain that it was against CTA rules to take pictures.

- The greater Chicagoland area holds a population of over 10 million, up from its roots of 100,000 before the great fire. That's a pretty substantial growth within a century. The public transportation system is really the only way to get from point A to point B without traffic at any point of the day here, something my dad pointed out every time we had to see any car hit its brake lights from our train windows.

- When you walk into the lobby at the Sears Tower Sky Deck, you are instructed to stand in front of a green screen in order for the staff to take your picture "overlooking the city" from the observation floor. When we got off the elevators and pulled up our picture, I noticed that another family performed a "jumping picture" for the cameras. I felt more compelled to buy their picture than mine and dad's. (Shout out to the Monroes here.)

As always, thanks for reading. War Eagle.

-6-