Chicago!

(all pics were edited in Google Photos, none in Lightroom - important only to me, I suppose. Maybe Shipman too.)

This was a train trip to visit James, and to celebrate Mother's Day, and Father's Day.

After a long and dusty ride on the rails, the first stop had to be for refreshment. One must be properly fortified. 

One of our favorite haunts is in South Loop, on Wabash just north of Roosevelt. Quoting the menu:

 Rubin’s Reuben Open-Faced Corned Beef or Pastrami, Swiss, Sauerkraut, 1000 Island Dressing with Fries

I said, "make that and pastrami"...

Next up; Mother's Day, the Architectural Cruise on the Chicago River. She's wanted to go for forever... we missed the 2:30 by a couple minutes, but then 3:00 and 3:30 were sold out, so we got tickets for 4:00 and hung out on the riverwalk, Well, James and Linda did. I fiddled with camera stuff. I settled on the Sigma Art 18-35mm f1.8 with the gradient density filter. Hoo boy.

(this is a work in progress, I have to ID the pics, but I wanted to get them on the blog)

Of course, I had to have us sit at the stern for professional photographer reasons I cannot reveal, and these two were happy to be anywhere on the boat:

We could have done the tour on this boat, at $1500 for two to six people for two hours, but chose to be among the hoi polloi:

456 Park is a luxury condo structure, 465northpark.com:

Below is the iconic Trib building, flying buttresses and all. Below it, that dark horizontal roofline on the right is the Apple Store, all glass, right on the Riverwalk at Michigan Avenue (more on that later):

Ah, there's the Apple Store - oh, and a few of our co-mariners:

Another look at the Apple Store, this from the west. Note how the roof is shaped like the MacBook and the phones:

The bridgekeeper's structure, now a relic, at Chicago Avenue:

300 S. Wacker, Willis Tower to the left. This map was added to an otherwise blah facade, showing the river and some streets with the marker indicating the location of the building:

The pre-map view with Willis trying to be inconspicuous behind:

This is a new structure on the south side of the river, east of the Swisshotel - Vista Tower. There's a construction-progress view from their webcam site, https://www.vistatowerchicago.com/webcam/:

And last and least... honest, I did not suppress the "T":