This year we decided to hopefully start a new Learish family tradition and take a mini vacation over the Thanksgiving holiday. We left Madison Wednesday and arrived at our swanky hotel around 7p. After taking in the awesome sites around the hotel we decided to embark on foot to the Willis Tower (formally knows at the Sears Tower) and do the SkyTower view.
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| We were able to see some cool stuff on our walk to the tower. |
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| This was a huge building that lit up from the inside and changed colors. There was a second tower like this one that had a huge face on it. If you watched it for a couple seconds you could see the eyes blink. Freaky. |
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| Chris has an odd attraction to Nutcrackers. How lucky that we found the biggest one he's seen yet! |
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| Chicago Theater! Donny and Marie Osmond still singing their hearts out! |
So, we walked around for about 35 minutes, catching some cool sites. We arrived at the Willis Tower and were told it closed at 7:30p. Seems someone (unnamed person) read the website wrong. This did not excite the kids that much. The walk back was no where near as fun as the walk there. But, we did stop and get ice cream.
Day TWO
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| Day 2! We set out to go to the Shedd Aquarium. This photo is very telling as you will find out later in this post. |
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| Can you see the sea turtle? |
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| Here he is again. |
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| I know it's blurry but given our love for this fish I thought I would capture this sign. |
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| Here is a tank of man eating red bellied piranha - vicious!! |
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| The spotted fish you see here is the oldest living fish in captivity. Don't ask how old he is as I forgot. But he does have a lot of age spots on him. |
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| Thinking they might enjoy a little canoe trip.... |
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| And who does not like camping? |
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| Look closely. See the stick like looking upright things? Those are fish. |
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| Seahorses!! |
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| Acacia wondering why this fish is allowing this very large lobster to sit on him. |
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| Seems weird to me too. |
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| Electric eels |
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| Mr Eel up close and personal |
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| Some kind of weird crab |
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| We watched a really cool sea animal show but my camera is not good enough to take photos at this kind of event. :( |
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| Acacia would have stayed here and watched the beluga whales all day. |
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| We also got to see Happy Feet in 4D! |
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| They had a GREAT jelly fish exhibit. |
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| And a fun little submarine to play in. |
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| touching things in the tide pool |
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| These are all from the Jelly fish exhibit. VERY COOL! |
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| Acacia found some jelly fish head band! |
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| Waiting for sharks to swim by |
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| As we were getting ready to leave the kids found this awesome remote controlled shark! |
Still the same day ... We finished up at the aquarium and walked to the Field Museum that is just kind of across the sidewalk! First think we did was walk through this amazing shrinking machine so we could see what it would be like to live as a bug underground!
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| Here was have completed the shrinking process and the first thing we see is a penny. Too bad we could not pick it up to have good luck all day. |
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| You can see on the measuring stick we got pretty small. |
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| Here Randy is getting eaten by this nasty looking bug thing. |
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| This thing freaked me out as I was standing there looking at it, it moved ... just slightly .... stupid bug thing. |
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| The kids were getting cold so they decided to crawl into these other dead insect bodies to stay warm. |
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| On the way out, we grew back to our normal heights! |
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| Where there is a computer ... there will be Chris. |
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| Acacia is praying to the "cat god". |
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| This is Sue. The largest and most intact T-Rex found to date! |
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| Not sure why I took these pictures. Just seemed like stuff you should photograph. |
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| Mom has one of these. Hers is green. |
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| I HAVE to have these boots!! |
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| Another 3D adventure. This was "Waking the T-Rex!" It was LOUD!! |
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| This is Sue again. |
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| Can you see the holes in Sue jaw bone? They think those are from infections she may have had. |
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| After we finished at the museum we went to Dave and Busters for Thanksgiving dinner. |
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| For those of you who do know, Dave and Busters is like Chuck e cheese on steroids. But, the food is a bizilion times better! Just not turkey. :( |
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| The kids won TONS of tickets and got some amazing crappy prizes! |
Next stop, Willis tower!! Now, if you recall the photo earlier in this post where I indicated it was "telling"? We subwayed, bused and walked to the Willis tower. We get there and it IS open. BUT - it's too foggy to see anything at all. I thought the kids were going to kill us.
Back to the hotel for a quick dip in the pool and then we all crashed!! Day 2 - complete!
