Mer is the coach of the Junior High Academic Challenge Team (think competitive trivia), and a few months ago her eighth grade team won a state-level tournament and so were invited to go to a national-level tournament in one of three cities (Washington, New Orleans, and Chicago). Mer chose Chicago because we know the city, it is closest, and the timing worked best. Last weekend was the Chicago tournament, so we headed out there on Thursday. Mer’s team consisted of six students, but all the students’ parents decided to make a vacation of it, so we did not have to worry about transportation or even chaperoning the students. We just had to show up and make sure people were where they were supposed to be. We also offered to lead a group downtown on Saturday if anyone wanted to go.

But before all of that, we had to get there. We left after school on Thursday, and made it as far as Mom and Marc’s place. Mom was still in Chicago, but Marc was home, and he was good enough to take us out to eat. We went the short distance to The Getaway, a Chicago Cubs-themed bar and grill. We had a pleasant supper, and Marc gave good-natured grief to our waitress and a few patrons. Marc is not shy! After supper, we went home and chatted for a couple of hours before going to bed.

Marc has a part-time job at a local car wash (about eight hours a week). We got up and ready in time to see him off, and he offered to wash our car if we swung by, possibly with something from the local bakery. Since I wanted to get breakfast from the local bakery anyway, I was up for that. So, we packed up the car and went to the bakery, where we got some huge breakfast pastries for very little money. We took one to Marc, and he washed our car, which was the first time it had been washed in at least a couple of years. He also showed us around the working area of the car wash, which I found interesting since I like to know how things work. We bid Marc a fond farewell, and we headed south. We wanted to eat breakfast somewhere pretty, so we stopped by New Buffalo, which is on Lake Michigan, and is a town where we had never been before.

We parked the car and walked to a nearby beach, where we sat on the sand in the shade and ate our very delicious breakfast. A local duck took great interest in us, especially Meredith, and he got to within three feet or so. It was amusing to watch him (or her). We watched boats come and go since we were on a small harbor, and we had a very pleasant time. We did have to leave without exploring the town, though; we were meeting Mom in Little Italy in Chicago at 11:30, and so we had a schedule to keep.

The drive into Chicago was uneventful (although there was some heavy traffic), and we found street parking on Taylor Street pretty easily. I had just paid the meter for parking when I heard Mom call out – she was coming up the sidewalk. That was pretty good timing! We went into the restaurant we had chosen, called Tuscany, and we were waited on by an obviously-from-the-old-country Italian man. The food was wonderful, and it was a great visit with Mom. We skipped dessert since Mom had made a special run out to Oak Park to a bakery to get us some cake roll that is drool-inducing. Mom takes good care of us. After lunch, we walked the four or five blocks with Mom back to her office since we had never seen it. We also got to cross some of the University of Illinois at Chicago campus along the way, which is a pretty place to walk. We left Mom at her office and went back to the car and made our way out to the O’Hare airport region to check into our hotel for the weekend, the Four Points Sheraton.

We found the hotel after some little trouble due to the myriad of exits on all of the highways, but we did find it. The room was clean and comfortable. We got settled in quickly, and I took a brief nap while Mer read. We had a big evening, and I wanted to be rested.

Since we were planning on taking a group of students and parents downtown on Saturday, we decided it would be a good idea to have a sort of “dry run.” We were headed to see a play just north of the Loop, and so we took the Chicago train, the El, to close to downtown before transferring to another line to get to the neighborhood where we were going. It worked out fine, but we were glad we had done it since it involved catching a hotel shuttle and finding the El station at O’Hare.

I decided we should see some theater while we had a free evening in Chicago, and while still at Marc’s I had bought a couple of tickets to a small theater that was performing Corleone: The Shakespearean Godfather. The title is accurate – the play was telling the story of The Godfather as if it had been written by Shakespeare. We had thought it might just be a bunch of “thee’s” and “thou’s” thrown in, but with the exception of the prologue, which was a little weak, the play incorporated a bunch of real Shakespearean texts into the story. Half the fun for me and Mer was trying to identify the various plays being quoted. The play really worked well, since the Godfather story is Shakespearean in plot (a large storyline with several sub-plots). I was very pleased by the play, and was sad that they were playing to such a small crowd (there were only about twenty of us in the theater). Mer and I went home quite happy with the evening, with the only damper being that we had to wait about thirty-five minutes for the hotel shuttle that was supposed to run every twenty minutes.