I admit - I cheated. I took the El train (Green line) down to Hyde Park (see post below). Every time I've tried to ride down there the wind blowing to the north is really strong. I hadn't been doing much long-distance biking for a while and didn't want to contend with a headwind. So I got lazy, and carried my bicycle on the El. (I love the fact that you can do that.) But I did ride back.
And the wind - blowing to the south - was really strong.
I turned east when I got to the Museum Campus - it's a peninsula on the south end of Grant Park that holds the Field Museum, the Shedd Aquarium, and the Adler Planetarium.
On the other side of Lakeshore Drive is one of the seemingly millions of new skyscrapers popping up all over the South Loop. This one is called "One Museum Place" and I really wouldn't mind living there.
Maybe.
I love the area, but it's so gorgeous and so world-class, it feels almost like being at a hotel full-time. My current neighborhood feels more real.
My camera is literally being held together by rubber bands, so it's really, really time to replace it. In otherwords, upgrade! Yay! But I'll have to put off the rest of the architecture pictures for a while.
In the meantime, here's a few of the shots I took a few weeks back. I took my bike down to Hyde Park and the area around the Museum of Science and Industry. The museum is very close to the lake, and there's a lagoon behind it with a pretty nice park. The day was a little overcast so the light isn't the best, but the weather cleared up in time for my ride home.
There were the usual Canadian geese that have become more common than pidgeons around urban bodies of water. But this time the geese were a little more interesting.
That picture to the left was about as close as I could get to them. The little ones kept walking away as soon as I'd get any closer. And I'm afraid I rather agitated the adult.
One of the things I love about Chicago is that, despite the large collection of super-large world-class skyscrapers, the architecture isn't off-putting. Quite the opposite, in fact - it really draws the pedestrian in. My favorite buildings blur the boundary between sidewalk and inside so that you feel sheltered by the building, not walled off from whatever's inside.
And my number-one favorite example of this just happens to be the building where I work.
Yes, this was a good day.
This is why I love my neighborhood
Yeah. I missed posting a picture on Monday, June 9.
Trust me, Tuesday's post will more than make up for it.
June 7-8, 2008, a typical Chicago summer weekend:
The Blues Festival is going strong down in Grant Park, the marvelous 57th Street Art Fair is blooming down in Hyde Park, and the Printer's Row Book Festival has exploded all over my neighborhood. Any one of these things could occupy an entire weekend.
I love this town.
Unfortunately, the other thing notable about Chicago, something I experienced my very first week here, are the violent thunderstorms that break out occasionally. We had a pretty severe one last night, accompanied by a large tornado [Edit: Tornados. Plural. As in, at least seven.] that ripped through the suburbs between here and Joliet. It dried up a bit this morning, but I'm afraid another heavy storm just broke out again, so that probably does it for the afternoon festivals. Painters, craft artists, and (particularly) booksellers are not fans of gale-driven streams of water pouring in sideways. The music event should be alright - the people might get wet, but that's one of the things you prepare for when you go to an outdoor festival. Besides, it will be going on into the evening, and this will probably blow over in a few hours.
(Update: That was written shortly before 1 pm; by 2:30 the street vendors were back up and running, and the streets were drying off. The author talks had never stopped, although the feed to CSPAN was interrupted.)
Shame about the booksellers, though. Yesterday more than made up for it - huge crowds, beautiful day, until about 4:30 when the weather turned. My camera's acting up again, so I can't download my pictures from the morning. I'll drop off of the memory card at a camera shop and get them to process it. Time to upgrade, probably. (Whee! An excuse!)
Besides - it's SUNDAY. That means - it's time for another episode of:
Camera Mistakes Passed Off as Deliberate Experimentation
Here's the last of the Starved Rock pictures. It's taken from French Canyon, again. (There are other canyons besides Basswood, French and LaSalle, it's just that there was only so much territory I could cover in one trip.) I didn't know the couple, but I think it's a nice setup anyway.
I was trying to come up with a better picture title, but I couldn't think of anything that wasn't sappy. So a straight description it is.
More pictures from Starved Rock State Park in Illinois.
Starved Rock - the rock itself - is a 125 foot cliff that has a spectacular view of the Illinois river below.
It's named after an incident that took place during Pontiac's Rebellion - the name given to the war for the Great Lakes region between an alliance of several tribes against the English and tribes who stayed with the English, following the French and Indian War. (It was during Pontiac's Rebellion that one of General Jeffrey Amherst's officers at Fort Pitt infamously gave some smallpox-ridden blankets to the local Delaware Indians.)
The story is that by about 1770, following the death of Chief Pontiac, there was considerable intra-tribe fighting, and the Illini confederation was being obliterated. At one point a band of Illiniwek (some stories say Peoria) retreated to this site and then was surrounded by the Potowatomi and Ottawas. The climb to the top is so long and so steep on all sides that it was an impregnable position, but after ten days the Illiniwek were dead from thirst or starvation.
That's the legend, anyway.
A couple of people fall off one of the cliffs every summer. Miraculously, there's been no move to choke up the trails with ugly day-glo colored safety fencing.
Like I posted before, the park is full of canyons carved out of the sandstone by the Illinois River (and its tributaries).
Usually those canyons have waterfalls, from the many creeks that run into the Illinois river. But in the late summer you can often walk right into where the water usually goes. When I was taking these pictures I heard some of the hikers talking about being disappointed that the waterfalls had dried up. But I thought it was more interesting this way.
And this is just cool:
A few years ago I took on a vacation road trip, where I drove along the upper coast of Lake Erie, the southern coast of Lake Ontario, up the St. Laurence Seaway, down through the Adirondacks to Saratoga, across Vermont on then to Boston. It took about a week, with stops in
- the Detroit waterfront,
- Canada's Point Pelee National Park,
- Niagra-on-the-Lake wine country,
- Niagra Falls itself,
- Fort Oswego,
- the Sacketts Harbor Battlefield near Watertown,
- the Thousand Islands,
- a four-hour hike in the Adirondacks*,
- John Brown's house near Lake Placid,
- Fort Ticonderoga,
- Saratoga National Park,
- Battleboro, Vermont, and
- "America's Stonehenge" in New Hampshire**.
Not to mention a tour of DeNiece's doll collection and and very fun football game starring DeNephew.
So many opportunities for awesome photographs! I took many, many pictures. Here are the best ones:
Oh, yeah, I forgot: MY CAMERA ATE THEM. ALL OF THEM.
EVERY. LAST. ONE.
Le Sigh.
* That hike? Very stupid. A seriously rough trail, covered with mud and leaves all slicked down by a recent rain, on a very remote mountain, long past the end of the summer season, with no cell phone coverage, and my car parked where you couldn't see it until you were on top of it. And no one knew where I was. I was lucky not to break an ankle more than a few times. But it was worth it.
** "America's Stonehenge" is a wonderfully cheesy antiquarian site. It's a privately owned patch of woods with a number of stone structures - megaliths - supposedly built by either Archaic Indians, or Phonecians, or Irish monks, or space aliens. Call me crazy, but I'm pretty sure it's the first option.
Point Beach State Park in Wisconsin is about 100 miles north of Milwaukee, 40 miles southeast of Green Bay, at the base of the Door County peninsula. It has a very good beach and some nature trails, but what attracted me to it was the lighthouse. You can't get too close, because people live there and you want to (and are rightfully required to) respect their privacy. But you can get a good view of it from the beach:
BOR-RING
And then, less than a minute later:
I dunno about you, but I think this second one is a lot more worth looking at. The light could have been better - if it had been morning light from the east it would have contrasted the white dunes more. But regardless, it's a definite improvement over the one in (washed-out, distractingly dull) color.
Most of the Morton Arboretum consists of gardens, open fields, oak savanna, creek-side willows*, and hardwood stands with typical Northeast woodland underbrush. Throughout most of it you can clearly see several different kinds of environment at any time. Just typical out-of-doors sounds and sights.
But there is one section that is so removed from the rest of the place that it's downright spooky. You take a right angle turn off the paved path and suddenly it's like you're in the middle of some deep primeval forrest. The acoustics improve so much that you'd think you were indoors. The temperature dives about 10-15 degrees, and the light percolates down through a dark green filter.
Whenever I'm there I halfway expect to find a gingerbread house behind one of these enormous trees.
I was there once with a friend and his wife and two little girls. The older one was about four or five years old, and her face showed that she thought it was really fun and exciting**. She didn't have the vocabulary, though - after a little bit she tugged on his hand and whispered "I'm scared." Given that I was subconsciously keeping an eye out for the Big Bad Wolf, I didn't blame her.
* Technically, it's riverside willows, as in the Dupage River, which runs through the Arboretum. But come on, you can jump across it. Back in Pennsylvania we call that a "brook."
**Yes, exciting. A bunch of trees. Uh, you have to be there.
