Vacationing with Kids. Well, it's...interesting.

We've had our first full day in Chicago, and it's been eventful to say the least. We left home yesterday afternoon and took our time getting up here. It was probably 6 1/2 hours, but we gave new meaning to the word "meandering". Jill found some good info from an Illinois travel office (their rest stops rock) and we decided to stop along Route 66 for some original road food - corndogs.

Cozy Dogs, to be exact, in Springfield IL. They're pretty good, and only $1.50. Logan discovered he likes root beer, and Liam still can't make his way through a bowl of chocolate ice cream.

We rolled into Chicago around 7 or so, and found the hotel. We're staying at the Hyatt Lodge on the McDonald's campus - basically the hotel that all the Mickey D's executives and "Hamburger University" students stay at. It's pretty nice, tucked into a little forested preserve right on the edge of a lake. We got a good deal, they threw in breakfast, and they have the best hotel pool ever.

Afterwards we headed out for dinner and introduced the boys to Chicago style pizza at Giordano's. I think they liked it.

The rest of the evening went fine, the morning not so much. Logan woke up around 6am and promptly threw up all over his bed. Since Jill was just getting off a pretty brutal bout with stomach flu earlier this week, we feared the worst. He kept getting sick all morning, and we'd pretty much resigned ourselves to a lost day at best, and a possible canceled vacation at worst. We finally decided to take everyone down for breakfast after Logan went awhile without getting sick. Apparently something did the trick, and he has been fine the rest of the day.

Around noon we decided to risk it and head to the zoo. It's close by, and the day was just too perfect to spend inside - sunny, around 70 degrees, you really couldn't ask for better weather. The Brookfield Zoo is Chicago's larger zoo and one of the better ones in the country. It's really nice, very shaded and park-like. We caught the dolphin show and the Children's Zoo, and saw a lot of other cool stuff.

Tomorrow I think we're headed to the Science and Industry Museum - bottom of Jill's list, but I think it's pretty cool. They have an intact German WW2 submarine, a bunch of Apollo space program stuff, an entire working Boeing jetliner that does a whole takeoff/landing bit with all the landing gear and wing bits flapping around. It's very much for the engineer in me. There's a lot to see and I think the boys will have fun. We're also going to try to make it to the Lego store, just to see the look on Logan's face.

More later!