Fourth of July

This morning I got up at 4:45 am. I had to be on the train by 5:20 to make it to a 7:15 start for the Elmhurst 4 on the fourth. I was a bit nervous because I was meeting a friend of a friend at the Oak Park el stop to carpool the rest of the way to the race. It worked out perfectly though. As I was getting off the train she was pulling up to the stop. The race was fun. It was a hilly course for Chicago though. I ended up with 3rd place so I got 25 dollars and a new pair of running shoes. I met a few guys at the race that lived in my neighborhood so they gave me a ride home. It was 9:30 when I got home and people were eating breakfast so it was good timing. After that we went to the farmers market (one block from me) and bought some fruits and veggies. Then we headed for Navy Pier. We actually went to navy pier to catch the boat architecture tour but it ended up that there were two tour groups and the one we wanted didn’t leave from navy pier. I suppose it was good that we walked on Navy Pier because you should do that once if visiting Chicago. There was a free ride on Navy Pier that you could ride in an artery. It was pretty tame but I did learn a little bit about atherosclerosis. After that we took the free trolley over to where the other boat tour was. It ended up that the next boat ride was at 3 so we had a couple of hours to get lunch. We walked to Millennium Park to the Taste of Chicago (which ended up being much farther than I thought). The taste was okay but there wasn’t anything I would really recommend. We were also pretty hungry at that point so we just wanted to find food. After that we went back to the boat. The architecture tour was really neat. The only downer was that it was raining.

After that we went back to my apartment and got dry and relaxed a little bit. Then we headed to Lincoln Park to find a restaurant. Much to my surprise, there really weren’t many restaurants on Clark between the 2000 and 4000 blocks. We ended up finding a Turkish restaurant on Broadway. I really liked it. It was cool because you sat on pillows on the floor instead of chairs.