Chicago Trip

This weekend Cort and I made the trip to Chicago. We had the BEST time!
We took off from our house Friday after lunch and headed to Mat's house in the North Center neighborhood (near Irving Park) in Chicago. We had tickets to see REM (see picture above) that night at the United Center. My friend, Catye Palomino has friends in Naperville who also LOVE REM (apparently Amy and I are a LOT alike...I wish we could have hung out more this weekend...it just means I'll have to travel over there again!), and they had tickets too. So after dinner in the Wicker Park neighborhood, Mat, Cort, and I headed over to the United Center to meet Catye, Amy, and Mike for the show.

This is my third REM show and it was AWESOME! Cort, Mat, and I had seats in the seventh row, so we were able to see everything up close! As usual, Mike Stipe (the lead singer) was a dancing machine, and totally made my year! Since I know not all of you are huge REM fans like me, I will spare all the details. But for those of you who are jealous of our weekend, you can read a review of the concert (with opening bands, The National and Modest Mouse) in the Chicago Tribune at http://leisureblogs.chicagotribune.com/turn_it_up/2008/06/rem-does-more-t.html. I agree for the most part with the review. I did not love The National, though I had heard good things. Modest Mouse didn't impress me too much either, but I like the band, so I would like to see them again in a smaller venue as a headliner to make a real opinion.


On Saturday, I had a girlfriend date! Tonya and I haven't seen each other since March, so we left the boys behind and went for lunch at Potbelly's Sandwichs and then to see Sex and the City in the movie theater! Clearly, we had tons of fun! We LOVED the movie! We love the TV series, and own all the DVDs between the two of us, so this movie was a MUST! We even sprung for the mega tub of popcorn! mmmm!!!! I am not sure if cameras in the movie theater is legal, but I needed a picture of us with that giant tub of corn...we also both had large diet cokes, and Tonya even had a box of milk duds. Yeah, that's right...it was girl's day...what do you want from us? :)
After the movie, we went to O'Donnovans, the bar where Mat used to work, to meet the boys for drinks and dinner. While we were gone, the boys had vague plans of going to a clock shop to pick up a clock Mat had that was being repaired and then to go to Rib Fest (Irvinig Park's Festival). Well, they never made it to the clock shop, and really only hit Rib Fest for about 5 minutes. They basically sat and watched the Cubs game all day at the bar. It was a really humid day, so I can't say I blame them.
So after an embarrasingly long parking spot search (we found five open spots right in the O'Donnovan parking lot), and seeing a small girl in a tu-tu and yellow crocs riding a razor scooter, Tonya and I joined the boys. We were sitting in the outside area, so we even got to watch the storm go through. And when it was time to walk back to Mat's we figured it was done raining. not so much...we totally got caught in a down pour!

After hanging out for the day, it was time to leave our BFFs behind in the windy city. Cort and I left Chicago around 9:00 pm Michigan time thinking that the storms were past. We made it all the way to Van Buren county before we realized that we were about to drive into something ugly. A voicemail from my cousin, Kelli, told us that things were not good at home: there was a car stalled up to its headlights in water in the entrance of our subdivision. Hmmm....maybe we should have stayed one more night. However after I white-knuckled it through the torrents of rain, and as we approached our subdivision, we noticed all the standing water was gone, so we were able to get home just in time for more rain to start pouring down.
It was such a fun weekend and we are so happy to have had the time with our good friends and then to arrive home safely...just in time to say HAPPY BIRTHDAY to Grandma Sluiter :)