January 5, 2008

Bringing in the new year!

REVISED: I'VE GOT SOME PICTURES NOW!
I was waiting to post about my new year's eve events, until I could put the pictures on, but I'll do that part later...
Jason and I drove to the train station and had a little over an hour trip to Chicago. Non-eventful, but pretty fun. We had just recently watched "Adventures in Babysitting" one of my all-time favorite movies since childhood, and it's based in Chicago, so my ideas of riding on the train was something like having one gang come in one door and another through the other end...
But, thankfully, no gangs!
Once we got off the train, we enjoyed the 20-something degree weather with sleety-like snow stuff from the sky, puddles of snow/ice from the ground and WIND from either side.
I wanted to take a cab to the place we were staying, but Jason thought it'd be too expensive and we were planning on stopping somewhere to eat dinner, but we didn't end up stopping anywhere to eat, and ended up walking the entire way to the Indigo. I had mapquested it, and it was 2.something miles (but I think that's if we would have taken a cab, I don't think that the walk was that long!)
A few minutes after we arrived, Betsy and Steve arrived (so much for saving time with the train, huh???)
Then we went out, again, to find something to eat.

By the way, I had this amazing home-made mushroom soup! It was so good! It was like a portabella mushroom thick soup, but instead of chunks of mushrooms, they pureed them and it was really creamy. They also served us fresh sourdough bread that was awesome. Super soft and perfect!
We then decided to head out to the Navy Pier for the fireworks at midnight. After a while, we hailed a cab, and since he told us that it took him three hours to get out of N.P. already, Steve decided that he could just drop us off at some road, and we'd walk the rest of the way... BAD IDEA!
We walked about 1/2 a mile, Jason slipped on the ice, we laughed along with many eye-witnesses, then found out that some park was closed, so we had to go another way, then we continued walking, towards some kind of "short-cut" that was neither short, nor a cut!
After we realized that the so-called "short-cut" wasn't working for us, we turned around to find that we had followers! Poor things! We found a cab that took us to N.P. and left the others in our dust (er... snow???)
By this time the temp was not as warm and the wind was more fierce...
We had opted for warm comfy clothes vs. the dressy clothes we had brought. And we were still freezing! I'm sure we weren't as cold as those "hot" little girls that decided to wear strappy heals (in the snow and ice) with short minny skirts... CRAZY!!!
Then Jason and Steve decided that they had to go to the bathroom! After fighting our way through the McD's, I saw something I've only rarely seen in my life... There was a LINE for the men's room! I couldn't believe it! We then went outside just in time for the count-down, then the fireworks! It was a great time, and pretty memorable. (Not sure if I want to repeat such a wonderful, exciting, freezing, windy time, again...!)
This is a picture of the highway on our way home... it sucked! There were accidents almost every mile or so!
So, what kind of eventful night did you guys have? I don't think any of my sister's wrote about their exciting way of bringing in the new year!!! Come on and share!

3 comments:

Rachael said...

Well, I stayed up til midnight, but I was on the couch, watching the ball drop on TV. KK and Lori were on the couch with me. EXCITING! :)

Oh, and before that, I was at Aunt Kate's house playing the white elephant game with all her friends.

Lori said...

I did what Rachael did, not too exciting, but I dont think your night sounded too fun either due to the weather. At least the fireworks were cool.

Shannon said...

Nothing much here in NY. We went over to Karoline and Joe's and I watched the ball drop from the couch. Poor Lisa. On the way over, she fell down the back porch stairs and got pretty bruised up. Since she wasnt feeling well, she left just before midnight and hit a deer on the way home in Ryan's truck. She is okay though.