Every city has something special about it. Sure, if you just listen to the news, you'd probably be too terrified to step foot in most cities, at least our big American ones, but that's the cool thing about travel, it deconstructs narratives so delightfully.
Sure, Chicago has its problems, but isn't that a thing where any human beings dwell? All I know is that I had a delightful time in that city, its downtown was fantastic, and oh yes, my favorite part, the entire metropolis smelled like food!
Seriously! Everywhere you went the air smelled of drool-worthy comestibles. Some aromas were dominant, Italian food and BBQ being the two. And it was just wild how you would drive through a neighborhood and the predominant smell was, FOOD!
And of course I had to have Chicago-style deep dish pizza when I was there. Okay, I actually had the pizza in Wheaton, a Chicago suburb, but that's because two of my neighbor heathen kids attend Wheaton College so of course we had to drop by and see them. One of them is on the football team, and by the end of the evening we had met most of the football team, some at the pizza restaurant, and some as we walked back to our truck.
An interesting note, as I met some rather large, Viking-resembling lineman on the street outside the restaurant, one particularly vibrant giant shook my hand and boomed, "Are you the K-road lady that had the SWAT team thing happen!?"
"Indeed I am," I replied in a most amused tone, "Did J tell you about the, 'Jimmy! Deploy the drone!" part of that story?
"WHAT?!" was the bombastic reply I got from the giant lineman.
It was then story time, as J had only relayed that the SWAT team had invaded the farm and cut an armed fugitive out of a tree at the end of our road during COVID lock down time, he never told them about the drone and dogs part of the story on my end of the driveway.
I love story time.
Anyway, back to the food.
Another nice feature was the plethora of breakfast joints. As we have been a bit overran in North Idaho, the few breakfast joints that we have are swarmed like carcasses in the summer sun, good luck getting a table, so it was super fun to just walk in and be seated. And then given huge portions of delightful grub.
My son's girlfriend ordered red velvet pancakes. She's about 5 foot tall and maybe 95 pounds, so the look on her face when this stack of pancakes came out was solid gold. Of course, I am not much larger than her, so when my breakfast enchiladas arrived, I am sure I had a similar look.
Over the course of five days we ate so many wondrous things, calzones, gyros, BBQ, the list goes on, I even ate an ice cream waffle cone on Navy Pier. That place though, it gets its own post because it was AMAZING!
And speaking of food, I have some sourdough pizza dough waiting for me, my work for the day is done, it's time for some tasty grub!
And as most of the time, all of the images in this post were taken on the author's slightly encrusted in pizza dough and the delectable lingering scent of the lovely city of Chicago, iPhone.