Chicago and St. Louis
Nice to see this city when it isn't winter
So I got sick in Chicago. It went from a twinge to an Oh God pretty quickly, forcing me to cancel plans with two friends and go to bed to avoid endangering the rest of the tour. I’m better now, kinda – when I stop moving it catches up to me. Dayquil, Nyquil, Caffeinequil and hope for the best, I suppose.
Anyway, here are some photos from Chicago and St. Louis for your entertainment.
Let’s start in Chicago. I’d been there three times before – twice in January and once in September. The two January visits obviously weren’t a superb chance to see the city. During the September visit I spent 90% of my time on the other side of mirrored glass watching focus groups. So this was really my first chance to explore a great American town.
And Chicago is that, most definitely. My car-service driver on the way in from O'Hare was a British expat with a bushel of hilarious stories about hanging out with Bad Company and Fleetwood Mac during a riotously misspent youth. He’d lived all over the world, and when I asked about Chicago he said, “This is a great city,” with the appreciative tone of a man who knows. My explorations were cut short, but I can’t wait to be back:
First off, I paid my first-ever visit to Wrigley Field. I talk about that in this post at Faith and Fear in Flushing.
Some photos:
Yeah, I went to the top of the Sears Tower. I’m deathly afraid of heights. They have these elevator-like booths adjoining the 103rd floor where you can stand out over the void. People lie on the glass. They leap up and down while their friends snap photos. Then there are people like me who get to the edge of the glass booths and begin shaking their heads in abject terror.
I did actually get out there, but it took the efforts of two tourists. One was an elderly Japanese lady who said, “I did it, so you can do it.” The other was a British matron who noted that I’d paid $19 to get up here, so was I really not going to go an extra three feet? For once my cheapness and susceptibility to peer pressure were positive forces.
I inched into the glass booth, managed to let go of the wall and kind of crab-walked out to within a shoe’s length of the glass, where I froze. I tried to take the last step. It wasn’t happening. I shot the horrible picture above and retreated hastily.
It’s me with Sue, the Field Museum’s awesome T. rex. I’m the one on the right.
Sue says RAAAAAH.
Around the time I was 30, I thought to myself that there were a few things I’d always dreamed of having:
1) a set of stormtrooper armor
2) Mets season tickets
3) a T. rex skull
I bought the first, which now proudly adorns a mannequin in my house. I decided the second didn’t make sense. I had no idea that the third was vanishingly rare. Getting to see Sue, though, feels not too far from attaining that goal.
This is upstairs at the Field Museum. I took this shot deliberately to capture the Charles R. Knight mural on the wall – an imagined confrontation between a T. rex and a Triceratops that fired the imaginations of tens of thousands of boys and girls over the decades. Myself most definitely included.
And on to St. Louis….
That, of course, is the Gateway Arch. It’s pretty impressive – I’d seen pictures of it, but pictures don’t capture the mind-boggling scale of the thing. So I had to pay the $10 and go up in it.
The Arch is … well, to invert Courtney Love, it’s pretty on the outside. Inside, you squeeze into these space-capsule elevators and rattle your way up to the top, passing panoramic views of … emergency stairs. Then you arrive at the top, unkink yourself, and emerge into an odd, curved space with little windows that resembles a basement rec room. You look out the windows and see the Mississippi River. And some buildings.
Um, yeah. A Facebook friend of mine had this to say: “You get up there, look out the tiny little windows, and suddenly realize that the only thing to see in the St. Louis skyline is the arch and you’re in it.” A little mean, perhaps, but accurate.
I was more excited to walk around Busch Stadium, unfortunately empty of Cardinals – they’re in Atlanta this week. (I can’t complain – this book tour will take me to four new baseball stadiums.) Looks pretty great.
Here’s Bob Gibson, captured in full flight. Love it.
And here’s Cool Papa Bell. Look, I don’t like the Cardinals and I find the cult of Cardinals fandom annoying. But any place with a statue of Cool Papa Bell outside is OK by me.