I'd never been to Chicago before – nor had I planned on going. Despite being a big fan of blues music, pizza and the Second City theatre, I foolishly decided early on in life that Chicago just wasn't a place high on list of places I felt I needed to see – a naïve perspective informed no doubt, by my early childhood exposure to NFL Films' portrayal of it as a sort of Siberia, but with football. It seemed forever grey, perpetually cold and unforgiving.

Contrary to my lame-ass impression, it turned out to be a beautifully sunny, warm and friendly place where my family and I were able to enjoy the day taking in the sights. I think we may have been a little lucky with the weather, but overall, I think it's safe to say that the Windy City, ain't so bad after all...at least not in July.

Some of the highlights of our day:

Waking up at the Hyatt Chicago Magnificent Mile
Riding the bus down Michigan Ave. to visit Cloud Gate. (We got there early enough to have the whole bean nearly to ourselves!)
Visiting Millenium Park and watching more people doing yoga together outside than we'd ever seen before.
Taking the girls to Maggie Daley Park to get the wiggles out, before the next leg of our trip.
Dim Sum at Cai in Chinatown.

P.S. As you might've already guessed, given the amount of time that has lapsed since the last post, we're accumulating experiences much faster than we can report on them, especially given the fact that we are pulling in to our destinations sometimes quite late at the end of what are truly exciting and fun-filled, but long days. As such, it's unlikely that I'll be posting every day as I had initially planned – in fact, it may not be until we've returned home that I get the complete chronicles of our trip posted. Nevertheless, you can follow the daily re-cap vids that I've been posting to YouTube, Facebook & Twitter. Family & friends, you can track us by way of the images I've been posting to our Road Trip album.

As always, thanks for the love & support. South Dakota, here we come!