Chicago; Friday, 19 April, 2019

I woke up once in the middle of the night, but was quickly able to get back to sleep, but by 6am I was wide awake and it was clear that I wouldn’t be getting any more sleep, so I got up had a long shower and then, almost as soon as they opened for the morning, headed down to breakfast.

The weather forecast for the day wasn’t good with strong winds and cold temperatures predicted, in stark contrast to the following days, so I decided today would be a good day to do indoor things.

I headed out of the hotel and over to the Museum Campus on the south side of the city. The campus is located on the edge of Lake Michigan and houses several of the city’s key attractions, including the football stadium, aquarium and my first stop of the trip – the Field Museum.

The museum has an enormous collection of artefacts and exhibits, for which it can only every show a tiny fraction out in its halls, despite the museum itself being massive. I spent the whole of the morning and well into the start of the afternoon looking round the various exhibits, and I didn’t really do justice to the collection.

One of their star attractions is Sue the T-Rex – so much of a star that she has her own twitter account. The most complete Tyrannosaurus rex skeleton every discovered she’s named after the palaeontologist (Sue Hendrickson) who discovered her in South Dakota in 1990. The exhibition had only very recently been given a complete overhaul into a new and expanded space and it proved to be a popular attraction with quite long queues to get to see the bones – but well worth the wait for the impressive sight of an almost complete T-Rex.

Whilst I could probably have spent the rest of the day, and much of the rest of the holiday in the museum, I was starting to get tired, so after a quick and very late lunch I headed out of the museum and next door to the Shedd Aquarium.

The Aquarium has the usual selection of species from across the world arranged into geographically zoned areas, and whilst there was a lot to see the sheer number of people visiting the aquarium meant it was difficult to see everything.

I managed to see a lot of the exhibits, but I decided against watching the dolphin and beluga whale performance which was scheduled as the last thing at the aquarium before it closed for the evening, instead taking the opportunity to get a much emptier bus back to the hotel.

I had a bit of a rest, mostly to try and get some life back into my aching feet from all the slow walking round museums during the day, and then headed out to grab a quick dinner in a nearby restaurant, before heading back to the hotel and turning in for the night.