Fits on the Road: A Birthday Celebration in Chicago!

By Cool J in Minneapolis

Last weekend was such a fun-filled time visiting Chicago. We were there celebrating a good friend’s 30^th birthday. We covered a lot of ground in a short amount of time, and made a lot of great memories.

Dustin was already in Chicago for work, so I flew in with two others on Friday, and we arrived around lunch time. We quickly took the train to the Hotel Palomar downtown, where we had all reserved rooms for the weekend. It was a nice hotel, especially for the price we paid, and it was in a good location for tourist activities. The past few times that I visited this city, I was there to see my sister who was living there at the time, and we never actually did a lot of the traditional tourist attractions. She lived in Roscoe Village, and we usually stayed around her neighborhood. This time, we were located downtown, and right in the heart of all the tourist attractions, which was a change (a change that was both for the good and the bad; the crowds were CRAZY!)

In all my visits to Chicago, I had actually never even been to the bean at Millennium Park. Dustin and I made sure to squeeze in a visit to this interesting piece of artwork for some photos.

Anyways, back to the day we arrived. We head to Central Standard for lunch, which was great. I had the grilled cheese (I’m a Wisconsin girl at heart) and a local IPA (Greenline I think?)

Then we walked down Michigan Ave for a little shopping. We stopped by Zara, TopShop, Nordstrom’s, Habadash (a cool store for men's accessories), and the Nike store 

While in the Nike store, we were fascinated by this Allover Flash Running Jacket. It’s actually made with glass particles, and is supposed to be really bright in the dark.

Per the website, this jacket has a “glass-beaded exterior that produces 360 degrees of 400-candlepower reflectivity for enhanced visibility in low light.”

We were encouraged to take pictures to show just how reflective the material was.

Pretty fancy, right?

Unfortunately, none of us were willing to shell out the $450 for this coat. Yep, $450. $500 for the men’s version! I have read a few reviews of the jacket online, and apparently it is not worth the price. Several users complained of chafing at the neck when running, and of a lack of durability on the reflective material. Guess it was a good thing none of us were willing to pay that much for a running jacket. Definitely not a price that fits the bill!

After some more wandering around, we made a stop at Old Town Social to warm up. Then we headed over to the Lincoln Park Zoo to see the Christmas light display. 

The lights and decorations were really cool, and put me in the Christmas spirit!

Our toes kept starting to freeze, even with a few pairs of wool socks. Fortunately a few of the zoo exhibits were still open for us to pop into to warm up a bit.

After returning to our hotel, we all joined up the rest of the party-goers (there were 15 of us) for some Chicago pizza, wine, and games of Catchphrase. I sure love that game…

Before long, it was time for bed. Several of the girls were running the Santa Hustle 5k on Saturday, but with my injury, I opted for a Flywheel class in the morning instead. I will do a full review of the class soon. It was within walking distance from our hotel, so my friend Mason joined me for the 7:30 Flywheel 45 class at the Gold Coast location. I thought it was a great workout!

After a quick shower, some of us headed to brunch at “Brunch.” Simple name with simple but great breakfast....and a few funky things like red velvet pancakes!

Post brunch, we headed to the Christkindle market , where we tried some strudel and spiced wine. The festival was quite crowded, but overall, I thought it was a cute little event, full of vendors selling primarily German goods, with a mix of other cultures as well.

Eventually, we made our way over to the bean for some pictures, and then back to the hotel to get ready for the big birthday dinner.

The birthday girl’s husband had reserved a private room in the wine cellar of Nightwood. We had a great time here over a long and relaxing dinner, until we decided it was time to dance off that dinner! We Uber-cabbed it over to the “Hange Uppe,” a dance club of sorts on Rush and Division. If you are familiar with Chicago, you probably know that Rush is a bit of a college party scene. It was definitely an interesting crowd, but we were looking for dancing, and there was definitely dancing there!

On the dance cam

The rest of the night was a blast, and the 7 am alarm to head to the airport came a little too early for this old lady.  Even though I was tired, I’m glad we left when we did, as a few hours later, a big snowstorm hit Chicago. Several members of the rest of our party were stranded at O’Hare due to the weather, with delay after delay before they finally made it back to Minneapolis between 1 and 2  am.

Chicago isn’t really all that different from Minneapolis (i.e. it was still cold there), but it was really a nice weekend getaway. It was a change from our normal routine, and it was awesome that so many friends could make the weekend work for the celebration. As I mentioned, there were 15 of us there for the birthday celebration!

Turning thirty is a momentous occasion, and I feel that we did it justice for our friend with a wonderful celebration!