Pics from Chicago
Aug. 17th, 2025 10:02 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
canyonwalkerChicago Trip Log #9
A few days later
I didn't include many photos in my blogs about traveling to Chicago last week. That's because readying photos for sharing takes time, and I didn't much have time between meetings all day and team dinners in the evenings. I had to rush just to keep my blog backlog from falling a few days behind. In face now I'm already interleaving this with my next trip, to Phoenix. But here I'll share a few pics.
As we flew in to Chicago on Monday evening around 6pm I got a great view of downtown out the right side of the aircraft. Yes, we were coming from the west, and in this photo the plane is headed east.... That's because our approach path had us fly past the city initially, continue out over Lake Michigan, make a U-turn over the lake, and come back from the east. We landed at Midway Airport.
Here's another pic of Chicago's downtown. I snapped several pics through the window of the plane. I'm including here the two best.
Once on the ground I hailed a ride with Lyft to get to my hotel downtown, the Radisson Blu. The driver had to make several U-turns trying to get there. Those weren't prescribed by Air Traffic Control, though. They were just a consequence of the driver's ineptitude and inability to follow both spoken and pictorial directions coming from his nav app.
I didn't expect much from the hotel we were staying at. We were on a central booking with a discounted group rate. In situations like this the hotel usually puts us in fairly basic rooms with a limited count of upgrades allocated just to the leaders. I got a room on a low-ish floor, which wasn't surprising. But what surprising was opening the door to my room wedged in the corner away from the elevators to find out I had an actual corner room.
And it wasn't just a corner room but a corner room with a wraparound balcony outside. The photo above is a pano showing a nearly 180° view. A glance up and down the two sides of the building outside showed that few rooms had balconies at all, let alone ones where guests could walk around a corner.
Oh, and the weather was stupendous. I'd be, like, "Whatever" with a nice balcony in cruddy weather. But this was beautiful weather. Though on Monday it was actually too warm to want to leave the door open for fresh air. Later in the week it was cooler but still humid.
While I didn't have much time to sit outside and enjoy the balcony— plus there literally weren't chairs on the balcony— I did find some time to snap a few amusing pictures with a stuffed animal I'd brought on the trip. In the pic above and below that's "Baldy", one of toys I take as a memento when Hawk can't travel with me.
Yeah, hawks and eagles aren't the same. We're well aware of that. But Baldy, here, is one of our travel birds. A lot of the toys we have are too nice for us to want to stuff them in suitcases and subject them to the tribulations of planes, trains, and automobiles. We decided Baldy should accompany me on this trip because she could fly out and grab sushi from that huge seafood buffet 1/2 mile over on the left.
A few days later
I didn't include many photos in my blogs about traveling to Chicago last week. That's because readying photos for sharing takes time, and I didn't much have time between meetings all day and team dinners in the evenings. I had to rush just to keep my blog backlog from falling a few days behind. In face now I'm already interleaving this with my next trip, to Phoenix. But here I'll share a few pics.
As we flew in to Chicago on Monday evening around 6pm I got a great view of downtown out the right side of the aircraft. Yes, we were coming from the west, and in this photo the plane is headed east.... That's because our approach path had us fly past the city initially, continue out over Lake Michigan, make a U-turn over the lake, and come back from the east. We landed at Midway Airport.
Here's another pic of Chicago's downtown. I snapped several pics through the window of the plane. I'm including here the two best.
Once on the ground I hailed a ride with Lyft to get to my hotel downtown, the Radisson Blu. The driver had to make several U-turns trying to get there. Those weren't prescribed by Air Traffic Control, though. They were just a consequence of the driver's ineptitude and inability to follow both spoken and pictorial directions coming from his nav app.
I didn't expect much from the hotel we were staying at. We were on a central booking with a discounted group rate. In situations like this the hotel usually puts us in fairly basic rooms with a limited count of upgrades allocated just to the leaders. I got a room on a low-ish floor, which wasn't surprising. But what surprising was opening the door to my room wedged in the corner away from the elevators to find out I had an actual corner room.
And it wasn't just a corner room but a corner room with a wraparound balcony outside. The photo above is a pano showing a nearly 180° view. A glance up and down the two sides of the building outside showed that few rooms had balconies at all, let alone ones where guests could walk around a corner.
Oh, and the weather was stupendous. I'd be, like, "Whatever" with a nice balcony in cruddy weather. But this was beautiful weather. Though on Monday it was actually too warm to want to leave the door open for fresh air. Later in the week it was cooler but still humid.
While I didn't have much time to sit outside and enjoy the balcony— plus there literally weren't chairs on the balcony— I did find some time to snap a few amusing pictures with a stuffed animal I'd brought on the trip. In the pic above and below that's "Baldy", one of toys I take as a memento when Hawk can't travel with me.
Yeah, hawks and eagles aren't the same. We're well aware of that. But Baldy, here, is one of our travel birds. A lot of the toys we have are too nice for us to want to stuff them in suitcases and subject them to the tribulations of planes, trains, and automobiles. We decided Baldy should accompany me on this trip because she could fly out and grab sushi from that huge seafood buffet 1/2 mile over on the left.
