By Land and By Sea...Or River

This 4th of July weekend something happened for Eric & me that rarely happens. I had a full day off! Deciding that we needed to take full advantage, and that we better have a great adventure to post about for our now three (and hopefully growing!) faithful followers, we set out for our next Chicago Adventure; The Boat Tour!

There are a million or so options for which boat tour you can take through the city. There's the speedboat tour which promises extreme speeds and if you take the "Maximum tour" a soaking wet good time, the double-decker boat tour, the 30-minute-so-you-can-say-you-did-it tour, the 75 minute crash course in architecture tour, and so on and so on. Being not particularly particular about what tour we took, we looked for any of them that we wouldn't have to walk to Navy Pier to catch (if you are interested in the adventures that could await you at Navy Pier, stay tuned, that post is in the works). However, the "We-Start-Anywhere-But-Navy-Pier" Tour does not exist, so off we set.

We left our apartment (in the South Loop, if you are familiar at all with the City) around 11:30 thinking we could be to the Pier in time for the 1:15 tour with whatever company's website we had visited last. However, around 1:00 we arrived to the last little neighborhood before Navy Pier and found a vendor selling tours from the sidewalk. Yay! For $35.00 per person we had secured our spot on a 2:00 tour instead. We ended up on the Chicago Line tour. You can read about all their offerings at www.chicagoline.com. (Reader Be Advised :: I will not post links to any vendor that does not provide a great experience!)

To pass our hour, we dined on premade lunches from what has become my favorite little market in Chicago, Fox and Obel. This market is located in the RiverEast part of the City and Eric assures me that if I had to shop here for my groceries weekly I would probably hate it. It is pricey! But we had our picnic style food, and we sat near the river & ate our lunch before boarding the boat.

The tour lasted about 90 minutes, which seemed to be a great amount of time on such a perfect day. The tip here is to pick to take your boat tour on a day that is about 75-80 degrees. Our day fell right into this range, and was mostly sunny meaning that for part of the boat we were really warm and for part we were cool, but for most of it we were perfect! The Docent (which I believe is a very big word for Narrator) of the cruise was a very informed lady who I think was named Nancy. The boat took us down three branches of the Chicago river and Nancy explained to us how the river was forced to run backwards (apparently all rivers run in the same direction...except the Chicago river).

From the boat we had some amazing views of the city, which I am posting here.

This picture here is the view of the Trump International Tower taken from the river. While we both wish that we didn't, Eric and I think that this might be the prettiest new building in Chicago. (It's hard to beat the beauty of the Tribune building!) The hotel/tower is built on the river. The bottom part is a hotel, and the top part is condos. It's all a light blue reflective glass. And yes, for the Apprentice fans in our audiance, this is the building that Bill Ransic worked on after his famous win on Donald Trump's show.

This picture on the right is the Sears Tower, again as seen from the Chicago River. For those of you "In The Know" about the happenings around here, soon the Sears Tower is going to be renamed. Stay tuned,
you know we'll be blogging about it! Anyway, for now, it's still the Sears. For a time it was the tallest building in the world. Now it is the tallest in Chicago. If you're wondering how it stands so tall with all the famous Chicago wind, it is because it is actually a compilation of nine towers of various heights. This gives the tallest tower the strength it needs to stay standing. The newest addition to the Sears are the "Ledges" which are two boxes made of (hopefully very thick) glass. They are on the 103rd floor, and when you buy your ticket to go to the observation deck, you can now step out into the glass boxes and look directly down 103 stories. The Ledges opened this week, and they are on the list of things we need to do so we can blog about them!

Finally, the last picture. While this picture may be boring to you, it was the most exciting for me! These buildings are the buildings that Eric and I look at out our window. Which means that just beyond them is our living room. Perhaps if the building was taller, or the trees were....well, not there, we would have a picture of our own building as seen from the river to show you. As it was, we saw the very top corner of it, got really excited, and didn't have the camera ready at the precise moment it came into our line of site. Instead, for your viewing pleasure, here are the buildings near our building!
As per my usual, I am going to end this post with some tips & suggestions for making the most of your Chicago River Tour.

• Be prepared to spend. This is not a cheap adventure. The more reasonable prices that we saw were well over $20.00, and generally speaking closer to $30.00. The Chicago Line was $35.00, but that included free coffee, lemonade, water, cookies and muffins. For the extra $5.00 over other tours, it was well worth it to have free drinks and snacks.
• Decide what you are looking for in your tour. If you're simply interested in seeing the buildings from the river, or being on a boat for a little while, I would not suggest the 90 minute tour for you. There are a lot of options when it comes to how long your tour will be. Remember how long 5 minutes seemed the first time you had to give a public speech? It's going to be a little bit like that; on a boat.
  
• Pick your topic! The various companies all offer different tours with different discussions. Ours was only about the architecture which was interesting but if you're thinking you'll learn about the City, the great fire, or anything but the architecture, do some research and find the right cruise for you!
• Sunscreen sunscreen sunscreen. You're sitting in no shade for a minimum of 45 minutes, in the middle of a river, with glass buildings surrounding you. This is not rocket science. Don't ruin the rest of your week by having a terrible sunburn. (For the non-believers, during a recent adventure to Navy Pier, on a very, very overcast day, I received a terrible sunburn that I am still peeling from!)