As we walked out of our hotel, I took a picture of the tower in the cloudless sky...
Opening time was 10am, but unsure of what time you needed to get there to line up to ensure you got up there straight away, we walked the short distance arriving about 9:15. The place was locked up with barely a person in sight. There was a McDonalds on the next corner (isn’t there always?...lol) so we walked across the road and grabbed something for breakfast and a coffee, keeping the entrance in our line of sight. About 9:30 somebody appeared from inside the building and placed signs out the front to signify they were open. There were not many people around, so we continued eating our breakfast in the warm comfort of McDonalds, just praying a tour bus didn’t pull up out the front with 100 Japanese on board and their 1000 cameras and camcorders.
At 9:45 we made our way over and jumped in an elevator which takes you down, not up, to the ticket office. It’s here that you buy your tickets and have the mandatory photo taken so they can try and relieve you of some ridiculous amount of money for a 20c print when you come down at the end. We paid a extra few dollars for the ‘audio tour’, which looks just like an old mobile which narrates points of interest to see from various points around the Skydeck. When you are at the window which has a 4 on it, you press 4 on the mobile and it gives you a quick overview of what you are looking at and directs you to places of interest. We had one when we went to the top of the Empire State Building in New York and for the extra few dollars it is a no-brainer, well worth the money.
After the ticket office, you make your way through a display area which shows special interest points and some trivia of the tower. You then funnel into a small theatrette where a short movie plays continuously explaining the history of the tower. It’s just like a Disneyworld ride where you go through a whole pile of crap to keep you occupied if the line is long before you actually get on the ride. Apparently the express lifts were having maintenance done on them, so the ride up was in a goods lift, obviously a much slower ride and for some reason, not clear to me or clearly explained by the ‘liftie’, needed to stop at floor 33 and 67 before arriving at the 99th floor. These stops were just a matter of stopping, doors open, doors close and off we go again. Once at the 99th floor, yet another lift takes you up the further 4 floors to the Skydeck on the 103rd floor.
Even though it was a super sunny sky, Chicago suffers from the same problems of haze that most major cities suffer from, so things get very blurry on the horizon. Here are some shots of the city...
A few buildings of interest were:
Marina City, which was built and opened in 1964 as an exclusive city address with its own theatre, gym, swimming pool, ice rink, bowling alley, several stores and restaurants, and of course, a marina. It consists of two buildings standing side by side in the heart of the city, although when it was built it was in an unfashionable warehouse area. The bottom section beneath where there appears to be break is the unit carpark. It is an open carpark where the cars reverse into spots against the railing. The locals call it the corn cobs...
What do you think this building is? Note the large exercise area on the roof and although you cannot clearly see it, there is a barbed wire fence around the top area...
It is the Metropolitan Correctional Centre, right smack in the centre of the city.
This is the John Hancock Building, formerly the tallest and most prestigious skyscraper in Chicago. It now ranks at #3.
This is the Kinzie Street Bridge. In 1992 it was undergoing renovations when some equipment broke through into an old forgotten tunnel/pipe under the riverbed. The Chicago River started to empty into the tunnel like somebody had pulled the plug out of the bathtub. This led to the ‘Great Chicago Flood’ which flooded every basement and anything else built below ground level in the Chicago city loop area.
This is the United Centre, home of the Chicago Bulls and the place that the mighty Michael Jordan plied his trade for many years. Out the front is a statue of Jordan with an inscription ‘The best there ever was, the best there ever will be’. It’s hard to argue...
The red building in the centre is on the site of the start of the great Chicago fire of 1871. History tells of a cow kicking over a kerosene lamp and starting the fire which burnt the greater part of the city to the ground. From this event, the influx of people who came to Chicago for the rebuilding and decided to stay, forced the city to come up with a way of accommodating everybody in an already smallish area. This led to the idea of building up instead of out and so began the tradition of the ‘skyscraper’ generally conceded to have had its beginnings in Chicago.
Half hidden by the tall building in the foreground is Soldiers Field, home of the Chicago Bears football club. The field is an open air arena on the banks of Lake Michigan which makes up the eastern edge of Chicago. I can only imagine how cold it would be in the middle of winter, high up in the stand with the wind whipping off the lake...
Grant Park, a superb sculpture of gardens and paths on the shores of Lake Michigan...
Traffic management. Damn you M5...
On the western side of the building they have recently installed glass viewing platforms where you actually walk out onto the glass and look straight down to the pavement...
We finished up around 11:30 and it was time to head back to the hotel to gather our bags and head for the train station to commence the last leg of the AMTRAK adventure. We took a short taxi ride to the station where an ever reliable red cap was on hand to help unload the taxi and escort us to the baggage check-in and first class lounge. We had a little time to kill in the lounge before our train was due to leave at 2pm. A check of the TV monitors around the lounge told some interesting stories. The eastbound version of the train we are on, the California Zephyr, was due in to Chicago at 2:50pm but wasn’t expected until 4am tomorrow morning, a delay of 14hrs!! The Empire Builder which travels further north through Wyoming and Montana to Seattle in Washington State was only going part way due to extreme weather conditions and a derailment of a freight train in a 20 foot snow drift!!
Soon before we were due to board, the monitors started flashing ‘delayed’ for our train and an announcement was made shortly afterwards, but no real explanation given. We sat in the lounge as first one train jumped the queue and then another. Finally at 3pm we were advised we were ready to board. A walk to the train saw us comfortably in our seats and the train pulled out at exactly 3:30, 90 minutes late.
As day slowly started to turn to night on a now very overcast day, we began to run into some pretty severe weather. Sago snow began smashing into our window and the now dark paddocks and fields were periodically lit up by giant flashes of lightning. After an hour of this, the train started to slow down until eventually coming to a stop in a real one horse town type station with a couple of dull street lights. The crew came on the PA to tell us that because of the weather conditions they had lost use of the horn and somebody had to climb up and attempt to have it working again. Something that struck me from the first trip was just how much the engine sounds the horn. It soon became apparent that they sound the horn every time they approach a rail crossing, whether there is anybody waiting to cross or not. Leaving LA for instance, the horn never stops blowing for ages as they pass crossing after crossing. Now for those who have travelled to Asia, we have all laughed at how it appears that the horn is almost as important as the steering wheel in negotiating congested roads, they are forever blowing it, but it appears that AMTRAK and trains in general in the USA are just as reliant upon the horn. It is the law that the train MUST blow the horn 24/7 whenever approaching a crossing. So what happens if the horn malfunctions, as it has now? The train must come to a complete stop each and every time it comes to a crossing!!!!!
Fortunately the poor crew member who drew the short straw managed to clear the horn and get it working again. The PA announcer said that it would hopefully either cool down enough for snow or warm a bit for rain, but the current freezing rain and ice that was smashing into the train and horn as it made its way thru the storm was absolutely the worst thing possible.
Of course this did not help at all in trying to make up lost time, but the crew had already warned that the chances to make up time in the schedule, which usually has some sort of built in buffer, was very limited in the run from Chicago across and suggested that before people lost cell/mobile phone service to ring anybody picking them up and let them know the train would be 90mins late at a minimum.
At 7:45 we made our way to the dining car for dinner where we had a meal with a nice woman, a few years younger than us who lived in Colorado Springs. She was also the manager of the Marriot in Colorado Springs. She had been visiting her mother in Iowa. For the first time I didn’t have the steak, electing to have the pork chop special. I’ll be having the steak tomorrow night. Diane had roast chicken.
Back to the room and there wasn’t much else to do but go to bed. We pick up an extra hours sleep tonight when clocks go back an hour from US Central time to US Mountain time when we cross from Nebraska into Colorado which is supposed to be sometime around 5am. I’d suggest it will be much later than that. The plan was always to get up early and get a seat in the observation car for the scenic trip into the Rockies, but rather than a 7am arrival in Denver it is now likely to be 9:30 or later.
I was just hopping into bed when the train stopped again, this time to wait for the eastbound California Zephyr which was 14hrs late to pass. We should have passed it 7 hours ago!!
This train is getting later and later...lol
Later...
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