Time to say goodbye to the city that never wants to switch its lights out. The pickup for the airport turned up at 8am & a couple of hours later we were flying out of Nevada for the birthplace of Ernest Hemingway & Hillary Clinton, Chicago, Illinois (Not its Capital, but its largest city). By about 4pm Chicago time (2hr ahead of the time in Las Vegas)we were @ our Hotel "The Palmer House Hilton", recognized for over 135 years as a landmark in Chicago.
This grand, opulent Hotel is the longest continuously operating Hotel in North America, and its guest list has included names such as Rudyard Kipling, Charles Dickens, Oscar Wilde & Buffalo Bill. Potter Palmer, creator of the Palmer House, literally bought & developed "State St" - the first upscale shopping strip of this great city, now a sad shadow of its former self. This hotel is ideally located in the center of the cities cultural & civic areas & is at the end of a $150 million restoration & renovation.
After checking into our room & getting settled, we wandered out onto the city streets to discover "the Windy City", which began life in the late 17th century & by 1871 was a busy settlement of many hundreds of thousands. But on October 8th 1871, legend has it that Mrs O'Leary's cow kicked over a lantern that started the "Great Chicago Fire", which burnt for days, destroyed the whole inner city & left 90,000 homeless.
This disaster became an opportunity to replace wide areas of substandard housing & create space for modern industrial & commercial buildings, like the world's first sky scrapper, which appeared on the horizon in 1885.
We spent a few hours discovering this impressive city, braving the wind sweeping in off "Lake Michigan", before heading to "The Big Downtown Chicago Bar", which featured a drinking area that is made to look like "Pullman Cars" - Very good meal.
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