Wednesday morning started off bright and early. Everyone kind of ended up getting up at about 6:35. We had set an alarm for 7, in the hopes of getting an earlier start on the day than the day before. We went and ate breakfast and when we returned to our room we realized we had forgoten to turn the alarm off, just like I used to do to Cliff when I’d go to Cleveland, all those years ago… 🙂

We took a different way to the park and ride, and even accounting for the fact that we got a bit lost, it did not appear to be faster than the original way. We got off the Blue line at a different stop, and took the #65 to Navy Pier. We had to wait at the bus stop for probably 10-15 minutes before the bus came (foreshadowing!), but we still made it to the Children’s Museum at about 10:05, just after it opened. There was no line to get tickets, though I do wish these places would make up their collective mind about whether we (as members of a reciprocal museum) should go to the regular ticket line or the line for museum members. Yesterday at the Museum of Science and Industry we had to wait in the regular line (it’s the same at COSI) But today, they told us to go to the members line. It didn’t really matter since there wasn’t really a line at either place.

We toured the museum for awhile, and then went out and ate lunch in the food court and walked around for awhile on the pier. While we were planning this vacation, we had talked about doing the Amazing Funhouse maze, but we decided to axe it. Same thing as the Cardboard Box syndrome I blogged about in my last post. It would probably be fun, yes, but would it be $30 fun for 15 minutes? Just seemed like we could find better things to spend our money on.

After lunch, we went back to the museum and wandered around some more. It was a much better experience than yesterday’s trip to MSI. The winning exhibit by far was called Big Backyard. It’s a little hard to explain, but there were white sheets (kind of like what you would pull down to use an overhead projector), and then projectors of some sort shooting things on to the sheet. Somehow it could tell when someone was standing in front of the projector, and it interacted with the shadow that you projected on the sheet. There were two different kinds. The first one projected butterflies and other insects, and if you stood still, a butterfly would “perch” on your shadow. You can kind of see an example of this at the link I posted above. The other one was more fun – it “dripped” beads down from the top of the sheet, and you could “catch” them by cupping your hands or other parts of your body (or props that they had there). I’m pretty sure Amy could have stayed there doing that for the entire day. Luckily we didn’t find this till the end or I doubt we would have gotten them to go anywhere else… A close 2nd as far as exhibit coolness, at least for the kids, was a working traffic light / crosswalk symbol that just alternated green/yellow/red and walk/don’t walk continuously, so, you know, cardboard box.

The #65 bus that we took to the museum was taking forever to show up as we waited in front of the museum, so we took a #124 “Navy Pier” bus that got us back to the blue line. Oh, one other thing I want to mention is that to Amy and Scott, the hotel == Chicago. Whenever we’re downtown or at the museum or on the train or wherever, they always talk about “going to Chicago” which means the hotel. “Let’s go to Chicago and go swimming!” “Time to go to Chicago and eat dinner!”, etc. No amount of telling them that we’re already in Chicago will convince them. It’s quite funny.