Chicago, Illinois --> Des Plaines State Park, Illinois

July 28, 2004

	Here is our room in the youth hostel. We got a private room since it was only a couple dollars more than two beds in a dorm. We were supposed to have a shared bathroom but there was a mixup with rooms and the room we got had a bathroom that the guy was going to lock but the doorknob was broken so we got a private bath.
	Chicago has an elevated train for public transportation. We took this downtown and walked for hours and hours. We had been just sitting in the bus and not getting much exercise for so long that this was now quite tiring, but it was fun to be in a big city.
	This is the Sears tower, which at one point was the tallest building in the world, but its height was long ago surpassed. Chicago has a lot of immigrants from all over the world, and some have formed neighborhoods. We went through the Italian and Chinese areas but didn't really locate anything spectacularly unusual.
	There were some nice sculptures on this bridge
	And some nice figures in the park!
	After a long day of walking around the city we bought some food and started driving out of town. Since we didn't know our way around town we ended up taking a not so direct route. We also encountered some traffic. Chicago drivers where of the impatient type that are always changing lanes but never getting ahead. In our slow bus staying in one lane we always caught up with the same people at every stoplight. You find these drivers in the outskirts of Seattle too, but usually drivers in the city know that this is just a waste of effort. People of Chicago seem to have not figured this out yet. <-- a grumpy Chicago driver
	The residential areas were pretty similar to the ones in Seattle but in the city there were a lot of fire escapes on the sides of the buildings so that it looked exactly like in a police movie.
	For a moment we thought we were in France ;)
	Since we left late we ended up driving into the night. The couple in the yellow Triumph below pulled up and complimented us on our bus, and we liked their car so we took Anu took some pictures. There weren't many old Volkswagens once we left the west coast.
	As if this wasn't confusing enough in the dark, there was a detour. We drove until we got to Des Plaines State Park, pulled in and made a quick dinner and then Anu went to sleep. I walked around and tried to find a place to pay for our campsite but couldn't so I went back and read for a while. We never did figure out how to pay for the campsite even though prices were posted.