St. Patty's Day in Chicago was...

Awesome! Chris and I have been dying to go to Chicago for the St. Patty's day celebration for years so in January, we planned the trip. It was my whole "lucking forward to the spring trip". It was just my whole focus on how to get through the winter months here in Michigan. We decided to leave Friday morning and we started towards Benton Harbor. We wanted to stop at a microbrewery called The Livery. We stopped for an hour then we headed towards Chicago. We stopped at China town and got some Dim Sum. That was a pure treat. I got the best Wonton Soup that I ever had. My gosh, it was terrific. I wanted Chris to see Binny's Liquor Depot and he thought it was amazing. We saw a $40K scotch there...amazing, someone would spend that much money on a liquor but when you have that much money, who cares, right? Then we headed out to Schaumburg and met up with Chris's friend Noah who he used to work with until he moved to IL. We hung out with him and his fiancee for the night at an Irish Pub in Arlington Heights. It was neat, the place had character and Irish dancers. We spent the night chatting it up with them we went back to the hotel room and crashed. We grabbed breakfast early that morning and drove back into the city. We attempted to get a metered sport over by the aquarium but they were not available so we headed to The Drake where we were staying to see if they would hold our bags until check in. They would so when I was talking with the doorman, he encouraged me to go back in and see if we could get an early check in and we could so we dropped our bags in the room and headed towards the river dying. I've always heard that they dye the river green for St. Patty's day and they sure do. They dump an orange dye in the river and it turns a bright neon green. We then headed towards the parade and we got there in time to hear the bag pipers and we watched a little of it and decided to walk back towards town. We stopped for lunch at a sushi joint across from the art museum. We then journeyed around the town, stopping into some shops, and enjoyed the sights for the rest of the day. It was perfect people watching. We got back to the hotel around 5pm and crashed in the executive room. We went out around 8pm to see the night time sights and it was crazy! Chicago people must avoid the Rush Street area because it was crawling with drunk people. Overall, we walked about 15 miles according to my pedometer so we got some great exercise in. Overall, it was a fabulous trip. So it's got me aching for our summer vacation. We just need to figure out where we are going. Is it going to be California or Utah/Colorado? We don't know yet but it's got to involve backpacking :)

I ate pretty well for the most part. I forgot my journal so I estimated high on the points. Better off safe than sorry. The only major spurlge I had was a chocolate malt from Ed Debavicks and some of the mochachinos that were free at the lounge (I'm sure the cream killed me on those but they were so good. 10 times better than starbucks). Lets just say, I will be very cautious about what I eat this week :)