After the long experience that was Electric Forest, which immediately followed a quick trip to Portland which itself was right after the ill-fated Beyond Wonderland at the Gorge, I was way more than ready to go home. But there was one last thing to do, this short look around Chicago.
Monday, June 26, 2023
After all those hours waiting in the line of cars to get out of Electric Forest that morning, and then the even longer drive from Rothbury to Chicago which included a stop for lunch, it was a little after five in the afternoon when I finally got dropped off by the HI Chicago hostel on East Ida B. Wells Drive, between Wabash and State. This was certainly one of the nicer and bigger hostels I've stayed at. It had the clean and new look and feel that the one in Portland had, only without the bar. There was an adjoining café/restaurant called Cafecito where I had dinner.
After dinner it was still rather early and I went for a little walk downtown.
"Race day in 5." What race are they preparing for? Four NASCAR races, it turns out; the NASCAR Xfinity Series races The Loop 110 and The Loop 121, and the NASCAR Cup races Grant Park 165 and Grant Park 220. These were all staged on this course through Grant Park, near where I took this picture.
This is the Jay Pritzker Pavilion in Millennium Park, where there was a band playing...some style of Latin American music that I'm not familiar with.
Tuesday, June 27, 2023
The hostel, HI Chicago, served breakfast in a cafeteria on the second floor. I had some cereal, peanut butter, and an apple.
My destinations for that day were going to be the Field Museum and the Adler Planetarium. Both of these places were real close to each other on the shore of Lake Michigan, which I could easily walk to from the hostel. What wasn't easy, though, was getting a good view of the Chicago skyline.
Looking north on the lake shore. There were wildfires burning in eastern Canada, with winds moving the smoke from these fires down to Chicago, making the air quality particularly bad.
First I stopped at the Adler Planetarium and bought a ticket for a space show, "Planet Nine," in the afternoon. Then, I headed to the nearby Field Museum to spend some time there.
Field Museum's entrance hall
The Field Museum has quite a lot to take in, much of which I didn't have time for. What I decided to spend my time on that morning was an exhibit hall focused on the history of the Americas before Columbus.
I had to capture this sign first, because "theory" has to be one of the most misused words in the English language.
"Clovis culture" arose in North America as far back as 11,000 BCE. As the sign says, it's named for the town of Clovis, New Mexico where their spear points were first discovered, and I just happen to live at the moment. What the sign doesn't say is that the town was only named "Clovis" after the ninth-century King of the Franks in what is now France, because it grew up around a Santa Fe Railroad switching yard in the late 1800s where the station master noticed that his daughter was learning about said king in her middle-school history lessons, and he thought that the king's name sounded like a good town name. The historical Clovis certainly never had an inkling of a suspicion that a thousand years after his death, historians would name a people who lived on the other side of the world ten thousand years before his birth after him.
They had some interactive games like this to really give you an idea of what life was like in this part of the world a thousand years ago.
It's perfect timing that I'm writing this not long after finishing reading Charles C. Mann's insightful book 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus which I hadn't yet bought when I walked through this museum. Cahokia was a huge city, not too far from today's St. Louis, though it wasn't laid out like any city we'd recognize today and was more like a cluster of adjoining farm towns, and was easily the largest such settlement in what is now the United States, before any Europeans ever arrived here.
Moving south of the Rio Grande, societies in what is now Mexico and Central America were far more urbanized than those in what became the USA. Teotihuacan, as the sign says, was the first city in the Americas to be planned on a grid system. And, it was pretty ethnically diverse for its time.
The time was slowly ticking away to when my space show would start. I had lunch in the Field Museum's cafeteria, and then took a short walk outside from the museum to the planetarium.
The space show in the Adler Planetarium was called "Planet Nine," and it was about the unconfirmed ninth planet that may or may not be orbiting the sun on the outer edge of our solar system, but all the dwarf planets out there as well. We all know that Pluto used to be considered the ninth planet but was demoted to dwarf planet status back in 2006. Some people still have a problem with this. If you watch this show, you'll understand better. There are a whole lot of small objects orbiting the sun at a similar distance as Pluto, like Haumea and Maki Maki, and Pluto is merely one of these. But there still might be an actual planet-sized object out there; there's no direct evidence of its existence--yet--but it's still probable due to unexplained gravitational effects on other objects.
Want to learn more about the planets in our solar system? There's much to find out here.
I spent so much time in this area, looking at all these examples of astrolabes, devices that mariners used to use to calculate their latitude. I took so many pictures of them because someday I want to attempt to make one myself. Now will I ever actually do this?
With still a little more time left before closing, I walked back to the Field Museum and quickly went through an exhibit on ancient Egypt.
An Egyptian mummy. We don't know her name in life, but she lived during the last years of the Egyptian state, under the Ptolmaic pharaohs under Roman domination. The museum's first president brought this mummy here in 1894.
With the museum and planetarium over with, there was one more destination for the day, Jackson Park. Earlier that year I had read this really gripping book, The Devil in the White City by Erik Larson, which I had actually bought a year earlier during my last pass through this city. This book, like all of Larson's other works, is a novel of real history, in which every event depicted really happened, every character really existed, and every word the characters speak was really documented in historical sources. This particular book was about the creation and design of the 1893 World's Fair in Chicago, but also the dark shadow of one of America's first serial killers who was seducing and murdering young women in Chicago at the same time this fair was being planned and occurring.
You've probably never heard of the 1893 World's Fair, which is tragic because so much of our society since then was shaped by it. Led by Daniel Burnham, who subsequently became a rockstar in the field of architecture, Jackson Park was transformed from a putrid swamp into a fairground filled with wondrously-designed pavilion buildings. Burnham even enlisted the aid of Frederick Law Olmstead, in the twilight of his career but famous for having designed New York City's Central Park, to make Jackson Park into the green space it is today. Many familiar consumer products, like Shredded Wheat and Cracker Jacks, were first presented to the public there. The first Ferris wheel was conceived and built specifically for this fair. They even had a "Best Beer" competition, in which the winner was a Wisconsin brewery called Pabst; this is why their beer has been named "Blue Ribbon" to this day. One of the engineers who helped implement this huge event was named Elias Disney, and it's suspected that his youngest son Walt had it on his mind when he designed the Magic Kingdom.
So with that book still fresh in my mind, I really wanted to glimpse Jackson Park with my own eyes.
I got to the park in a bit of a roundabout way that wasn't the most efficient. I rode the L's Red Line to the 63rd St. station. What I should have done was take the Green Line to Cottage Grove, or better yet, taken a Metra commuter train to the U. Chicago/59th St. station; remember that if you want to go to Jackson Park! So I stepped off the train pretty far from my destination, thus I had to ride bus 63 all the way to Stony Island Ave., which runs along the western edge of Jackson Park, and walk north from there. The park was on my right, and much of it was hard to reach, separated from the street by road construction. Well at least I'm getting more steps this way, right?
The Barack Obama Presidential Library was under construction here, at a point in Jackson Park where it intersects with another park, Midway Plaisance. 130 years ago, one of the World's Fair buildings, the Woman's Building, was on this spot.
Another green space, Midway Plaisance, is laid out east-west with its eastern end adjoining Jackson Park, with Stony Island Parkway separating the two. This was part of the fair, too, and historically important because this is where the world's first Ferris wheel was. That's another legacy of the fair. Since the previous World's Fair, in Paris in 1891, had debuted the Eiffel Tower, then the world's tallest building, the Chicago organizers wanted to "out-Eiffel Eiffel." They entertained so many bizarre and mostly unworkable proposals to do that, until an eccentric young engineer named George Ferris from Pittsburgh walked in with his idea for a giant rotating wheel with cars hanging regularly around it, in which people could sit and enjoy the view. The organizers thought this was so crazy, it just might work.
Midway Plaisance today. It's still a huge bucolic city park. I wonder how many people that regularly visit it know that the world's first Ferris wheel was once here?
Just the presence of a place called "Midway" was another legacy of the fair. Have you ever been to any state or county fair with a Midway? All of them are, intentionally or not, imitating the 1893 World's Fair.
I don't want to ramble on too much about the 1893 World's Fair. I'm just going to recommend The Devil in the White City again because it's really a fascinating book.
The University of Chicago adjoins the Midway Plaisance to the south. It was next to some of the campus buildings I found a place for dinner, Truth Be Told, on 60th near Woodlawn. For dinner I got a butter lettuce salad with blue cheese and cod, just what I needed after all that walking, and some coffee to keep me going. They also had some great beer here too, and I had an English ale called Marx Mild.
With nothing left to do around the parks, I walked to the L station at Cottage Grove and 63rd and rode the Green Line train north to the Roosevelt Rd. station, just a little south of downtown.
I wasn't all done yet, though. Before retiring to the hostel, I had to make one last stop at an Irish pub, since I hadn't been to one yet in this city. Kitty O'Sheas is at Michigan and 8th. First I had a Goose Island Green Line pale ale. Not bad. Finally I had a familiar Irish ale, Smithwick's.
Wednesday, June 28, 2023
Finally, this long voyage was almost over and I would be flying home later that morning. My flight out was at a reasonable 8:45am, it was on Southwest--paid for with reward points--and flying out of Midway Airport, which is much closer to the city center than O'Hare is. After getting breakfast from the hostel and checking out, getting to Midway on the L train was easy.
There were two flights: first from Chicago Midway to Dallas Love Field, and from Dallas to Lubbock. The second one landed in Lubbock at 12:50, and then I had a 90-minute drive from Lubbock to Clovis, during which I gained an hour crossing from Central to Mountain Time.
This trip may have been over, but it didn't quite feel like it, because I had such a short break between this one and the next one. Thursday and Friday I was back at work, although this actually felt relaxing because I was being rather under-utilized at work at that time so I didn't do a whole lot more than scrolling through Reddit. The next weekend was going to be a four-day with the last one being the Fourth of July, and I would be spending most of it at another festival, June Jam.
Beyond Wonderland & Electric Forest 2023 Trip:
- Beyond Wonderland at the Gorge 2023
- Stopping for a Quick Look at Portland
- Electric Forest 2023, and a Chicago Restaurant Recommendation
- Getting a Look at Chicago after Electric Forest
