Vacation - Chicago

Last year I had the opportunity to take one of the "Architectural Tours" on a river boat while I was in Chicago on business. It was late fall and literally a week or so before they stopped running for the year. I thought Tania would enjoy it as much as I did so we decided to go to Chicago for the weekend.

I used some Marriott points and we stayed in a new Marriott on the south side of Chicago. Rooms facing the lake or the city were $40.00 a night more than the rooms facing south or west.

We spent the first evening there signing up and buying tickets for what we wanted to do on Sunday.

The Museum of Science and Industry was just a few miles south of our hotel. We signed up for the "Giant Dome Theater" and the U-505 exhibit in the morning with just under two hours to get to the dock for the "Architectural Tour".

The Giant Dome Theater was good but the U-505 was awesome. As you made your way to the exhibit there were long hallways that had everything from signboards to holograms that told the story of how the U-505 was captured. Just as you get to the point of capture, you turn a corner and this is your first view.

You could literally reach out and touch the sub from the mezzanine.

The lighting under the sub flickered to give the illusion of it being in water. Around the base of the sub there were multiple displays set up which contained artifacts from the sub. It was amazing the amount of items they still had that were in the sub as well as what they found years later when it was moved into the building.

The conning tower shows the damage from both small arms fire as well as a deck gun.

If you have ever been in a sub before, I would not recommend paying extra to tour the inside. Its a pain to schedule and not that much to see.

After you leave the display there are more signboards that explain how the sub was brought to Chicago, the time it spent on the lake and how it came about to be where it is currently housed.

We were able to leave the museum and make it to the dock with 30 minutes to spare. The Architectural Tour I would also highly recommend, even with doing it a year before, because I went on a different companies tour most of the information the guide narrated was new to me. The tour takes about 90 minutes to accomplish and it was a perfect day for it.

Because we went in the afternoon I didn't get any good pictures, they were all washed out by the sun. This is a picture from the last time I went.

The following day we had planned to drive though Rockford and follow the river down to St Louis. Unfortunately the weather didn't cooperate and driving a scenic route 500+ miles in the rain didn't sound like a ton of fun so we headed home.