Our Chicago Trip (I'm a Dork)

Shannon and I spent the last four days on a trip to Chicago. We figured it was a good idea to get away for a long weekend, and what better place to go than the city with the nation's highest gas prices.

We had four days off (work has been slow for me and I actually had all my school assignments done ahead of time) and took the seven hour drive from Omaha to Chicago bright and early on Saturday morning. On the way we stopped for lunch at Iowa City, a lovely college town that reminded us quite a bit of Lawrence. My primary reason for wanting to go to Chicagoland was the fact that many of my favorite films were in fact filmed in the Chicago metro area. While there we visited some of the most random places where great American movies were filmed, such as

Groundhog Day


Home Alone


Stranger Than Fiction


Wayne's World

and Ferris Bueller's Day Off


In conclusion, I am a dork. As Shannon took pictures of me in these nostalgic places, people who were systematically going through their everyday lives wondered "who are these strange people taking pictures in front of random, unimportant backdrops?" Movies I grew up watching allowed me to be more aware of these places than the people who actually lived there. 18 years after Home Alone was a smash hit, I am the lone lunatic who had my picture taken in front of that once famous house a couple days ago while the mailman next door laughed.

Why am I fascinated with these places? Because they're real. They're not some Hollywood set. Plus, they're in the midwest, in relative proximity to where I currently reside.

Shannon and I did do a couple of touristy things. We went to the top of the Sears Tower and caught a Cubs game at Wrigley Field. But it was the non-touristy things that stood out the most for me. After all, how many people visit a place with their primary goal in mind to visit as many locations as possible where some of their favorite films were filmed? Not too many, I'd say.

It was a great time, despite the over 7 million people living in the suburbs. We drove around on Monday for hours through endless strip malls, subdivisions, and stoplights to get back to our hotel in Naperville. And I thought Kansas City was bad. Talk about suburban sprawl. But the city of Chicago is just a nice place. I was telling someone today that it probably has some of the best architecture in the world.

The only major annoying thing about downtown Chicago- no restrooms. Kudos to Starbucks, the only place that didn't seem to mind if we just stopped by to urinate.