Time to come home. We could see I90 from our hotel room window. Traffic was bumper to bumper most of Friday, and all of Saturday. We wondered if it was crazy to come home through Chicago (rather than taking the toll roads west of the city). But it was fine last year, so we decided to chance it.
Hmmmm. This doesn't look promising, traffic-wise....
(see the flock of birds, center? and be sure to notice excellent sky)
Coming through town was fine on Sunday morning. No slowdowns to speak of.
I love recognizing a city's skyline. Every city should have some signature buildings.
I remember reading about the brand-new Hancock building in Life magazine, when I was in junior high..... (don't miss the clouds in this one. wow.)
Watercolor version.
Here begins a digression. I wondered what that building is, with the four pointy tower thingies on the corners, between us and the Hancock building.
So I went to maps.google.com
I got to the map you see if you click on the above by putting "hancock building, chicago, il" in the search box, and then I scrolled in.
Goodness. It seems like every time I look at google maps you can scroll in farther than before. You can almost see what the people are wearing, if you scroll in far enough! Yikes! Cool, but scary....... Google only shows a version that is quite old (months, at least), but *someone* can see the current version, any time they want......
Ok. Deep breath.
No label on the building I was trying to identify, though you can see it clearly on the map/satellite image, kitty corner across Michigan from the Hancock building.
I hadn't realized the Hancock building was a pyramidal section, but you can see that clearly, too.
Wow.
Take a moment to look at Chicago from the air. You can see the ferris wheel on Navy Pier, and you can see the cool stuff at Millenium Park clearly.
It is verrrrry cool to get this birds' eye view of a place!!!! Did you know that you can click and drag in the map to move it around? I like that much better than clicking on the navigation buttons. Your scroll wheel will zoom you in and out, too (though the directions are backwards from the way I think they should be).
Google rocks.
End of digression.
Not all of the cool buildings in Chicago are extremely tall.
But lots of them are.
Sears Tower. I'm liking that blue building between us and the Tower, and I like the street light, too.
Watercolor.
Chicago, like Charlotte, NC, is clearly a city on the move. One of these snapped-from-a-moving-car images got four construction cranes just east of the highway.
Lots of the construction is residential.
We love Chicago. Happy sigh.
Ok. Moving along.
We will now have a Sky Appreciation session, with a series of "on the road again" watercolors.
Interupting our Sky Appreciation -- what is this?
Someone has placed thousands of Very Big Rocks in a line near the highway. This went on and on. For a mile, I bet. Someone spent Very Big Bucks placing all of these rocks.
We decided it is an Art Installation, and we like it. It wasn't there last year.
I did a quick google for "boulders i94 michigan" and did not find this. It is north of I94, somewhere in the western half (I bet) of Michigan.
Back to our regularly scheduled Sky Appreciation.
Mmmmm. Big Sky, Michigan style.
Just before we got to Ann Arbor, there was a section of the highway median where someone had planted hundreds of daffodils. They were blooming as we zoomed by. I didn't have time to get the camera out, awake, ready. Pics probably would not have turned out, in any case. The closer you are to something, the less likely it is to be recorded crisply, when you are going 70 mph.
I am grateful to whoever planted those flowers. It seems to me that highway medians are a wonderful spot for natural plantings. I understand that they don't want to have trees in there, but why does it have to be shaved-off grass?
I always enjoy flowers and other interesting plants along the road.
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