Sweet July Nights: Yet ANOTHER Trip To Chicago

We make a trip down to Illinois......a lot!! It's where 2hotty and I grew up and its where most of our family live now. So every time we're there we plan a whole itinerary of things to do. Our main goal this time was to shop for "home things"......therefore a pit stop to Ikea was in order and because our friend Chris was also joining us we made a point to go downtown for a little bit of sight seeing!!

(read about our last trip HERE, HERE, and HERE!!)

It was SO great having someone else in the car that would listen to Scott's crazy and random singing and thoughts!! We usually give him a limit as to how many annoying songs and things he can say throughout the whole trip. Ya its THAT bad! HA!

While Chris was ~~babysitting~~ hanging out with Scott, I was left alone in the back seat with gossip magazines and my camera! I learn something new every time I mess around with it!

Look how beautiful our car ride down was:

This is au natural........No Photoshop Needed....taken while we were in a moving car on the interstate!!

Just Mother Nature doing her thing and painting a beautiful Mosaic for all to see!

I wanted so bad for Chris to pull over so I could get a silhouette shot of me and 2hotty but 2hotty put a kabosh to it right away (something about it being too dangerous).....what a party pooper!!

The next day everyone got ready and we headed for the city!!

It was such a beautiful brisk Fall day!! We got really lucky this year with great weather......unlike last year when we practically drove home in torrential tornadoish downpour!! I almost peed my pants!! I get heart palpitations when I see lightning and hear loud thunder ( just some randomness for you).

Not this year......we had awesome weather and most importantly we spent it awesome people!!

Yes this cutie patootie is totally awesome:

This girls ganna SNAP!!

Mommy and baby Nathaniel:

Smiles for Aunty JoJo:

Every time I see this I take a deep breath and go Ahhhh!!!

It's such an amazing city.......with so much to do and see and I feel like I NEED to experience it ALL!

You know your in China Town when you stop to get gas and see this:

Chris loves everything Asian so we wanted to show him Chicago's Chinatown:

I haven't really walked around Chinatown before this trip, so it was pretty much a first for me too.

It was definitely an experience to say the least!!

Chinese BBQ is what I'm OMG'ing about:

What's that orange thing in the window????

I guess everyone in Chinatown drinks this stuff:

It's called bubble tea and it comes in a lot of different flavors. The black ball looking things on the bottom of the cup are tapioca balls! It's pretty much a shake.....however I could have done without the tapioca!

It was a bit different as you can tell from 2hotty's first reaction (I thought it tasted like big snot balls running down the back of my throat........I guess its an acquired taste!!)

The Chinese Bakery was interesting too:

95 cents......ya right you would have to pay ME a lot of money to try this thing and even so I don't know if I could do it:

The tea store carried all sorts of specialty teas that could cure almost everything imaginable:

I bought some cute Chinese spoons as a little souvenir of our time there. I'm going to use them at our next sushi night at home!

All in all we had a great time in Chinatown....................

.............but we left there SUPER hungry!! I'm sorry but no million (thousand?!?! even if they were one year old I couldn't do it) year old egg buns for these kids!!
So I turned to my trusty Tripadviser App to find us a yummy restaurant to eat at.

(passing the Chicago Stock Exchange)