July 3rd, 2001

Another slow morning... I'm still pretty exhausted after yesterday. Wake up in the usual way, my trusty alarm clock trotting in tail wagging all happy to have someone else to pet her again. ;)

Fluster! She hides upstairs away from the dogs, usually.

Their house.

The wind in the willows...

I don't recall if I mentioned this before but I'd never been to Pam and Jock's house here in Illinois before... ever. In fact, the last time I had been up to Illinois to visit them I'd only been like 5 or 6 years old. They'd lived somewhere else then. On that note, my mom hasn't ever been up here either... so I figured a few more pictures were in order.

It appears as though the actual city of Chicago shoots off its fireworks on the 3rd, while all the outlying towns and suburb areas do theirs on the 4th. The traffic from the fireworks combined with the traffic for Taste of Chicago promises to be insane. And I guess they do this every year?

Libertyville Station

"The Taste".

We travel into the city with Mike and Julie, goal being to meet up with Molly and some of her friends once we get there. The train heading down into the city is packed. Union Station is also a madhouse. We manage to get through the station and out onto the streets. We call Molly to find out that she's at Navy Pier and has found a good place to catch the fireworks at. We decide to walk the whole way there, which we later discover, was probably sort of a dumb idea.

Travelling towards the pier we pass by a sign signifying the end of Historic Route 66. The end of the first leg of my trip was quickly coming to an end. As we walk we travel through center of The Taste Of Chicago. Pedestrian traffic is damn near gridlocked. We manage to get through all that and get back into open road, or at least as open as it's going to be through this city. People swarm briskly up and down the sidewalks. We're making a bee-line to the pier so we're continually passing and cutting in front of people. We go by a section of the town called Lakefront and people are scattered all over the grassy patches that dot the area beside the water, sitting on lawn chairs and blankets. We find out later that this would have probably been the best vantage point to watch the fireworks, but ah well.

As we walk, we begin to realize exactly how far it is from the train station to Navy Pier. It takes us nearly an hour and a half to walk the full way. It's bad even when we get to the Pier... it sure didn't seem this long yesterday...

The 4th of July done puked all over them!

Tuyen and Jess do the funky chicken. ;)

We find Molly and company at the Beer Garden. She's there with Tuyen, a guy named Ryan and his wife, named Jess. The six of us sit around and bs a while as we wait for the fireworks to start. Ryan is an interesting fellow... we get into a very in depth discussion about whether or not the United States actually landed on the moon. Of course, we all gave Ryan crap for thinking that we haven't but as the discussion progressed he actually made a fairly solid case about how it could've all been faked. Of course, I need to do some more research on this now.

Eventually Jess and Ryan have to leave... apparently they're running in some sort of marathon tommorrow and need a good night's sleep. Before they take off Jess and Tuyen decide to go for a dance. There's a live band playing covers of various songs before the fireworks begin, and so the two of them cut a rug while the rest of us kick back and relax.

Around 9pm the band stops playing and they switch over to a feed from a local radio station. It seems as though the fireworks this year are going to be synchronized with a number of musical selections that will be broadcast by the station. Molly told me there was an actual symphony orchestra performing the music.

The fireworks begin, and indeed they are synched rather tightly with the music. It's a near continual barrage of explosions as the music progresses. I think I read somewhere that they were shooting off several thousand explosives this year. Unfortunately my camera doesn't capture how dazzling it is. As you can tell from some of my other photos... it has issues taking pictures at night. Oh well...

The fireworks display is over in like 20 minutes. Overall we had a good vantage point to take them in... but we were a pretty decent distance away from them. Most of the booms we really heard came from the background of the orchestra playing. Not that there's anything wrong with that... I just like being close so the explosions hurt my ears. ;) Well, not quite that close. Alie and I talk to Molly and Tuyen a bit about meeting up tommorrow before we head out to DC, then begin our trek back to Union Station with Mike and Julie.

Mike consults with Chicago's Finest. ;)

I'm not sure what our reasoning for walking the entire length back was... but I'm sure there was a good one. Traffic is awful until we get about a third of the way there, then it died out considerably. Julie suggests several times that we flag down a cab, but there aren't a lot to be found... I think they're supposed to be on strike or something.

But regardless, we walk the entire way back. We figured it up and decided we'd walked about 10 miles that evening. We were haulin' tail too, we didn't want to miss the last train back to Libertyville.

We get to the train station and load into the train bound for Libertyville. Then they HOLD that damn thing for an hour and a half to make sure everyone can get to the trains. That wouldn't have been so bad if it hadn't been for the two dozen little punks that decided to ride the train and were noisy all hell the entire time. The conductor almost had a couple of them thrown out for their behaviour.

So, suffice to say the ride home was largely unpleasant. We didn't get in until almost 2am. We also found out that all the kids that were being annoying and loud were also from Libertyville. Julie made her disgust known that she might have actually gone to school with some of them.

Originally, I had thought about heading into Chicago in the morning and bumming around all day. Because of the lateness of our return I promptly toss that idea out and decide I'm gonna sleep in if it kills me.