Alex's 16th Birthday Trip - 2 years late!

Alex turned 16 in March, 2020. Unfortunately, this birthday was overshadowed by the Covid Pandemic. After a few failed attempts at scheduling and rescheduling a trip to Chicago (shopping, food, etc), we finally planned her Chicago weekend for April 2022 - she was done with school and in a job that didn't have weekend schedules. 

Then Covid hit our house! Unfortunately a few of us were down for the count and we weren't up for traveling (she was beyond the contagious stage by that weekend, but her cough was still yuck so we decided to lay low and reschedule our weekend).

It worked out well - we set aside a weekend in May, booked a hotel and made some tentative plans.

Alex had asked about the possibility of attending a Cub's game while there. We decided to play things by ear (weather, game times, etc). 

We left the house around 8 am on Saturday morning and drove to Schaumburg. First stop was Chicago style pizza at Lou Malnati's. After we filled up on yummy pizza, we drove to The Container Store and IKEA. We had a blast as we explored the stores - imagining furniture in the layout of the upstairs apartment (Alex and Kaitee will be moving upstairs the first part of July). 

It's hard to believe that we didn't take any pictures at Lou's, The Container Store or IKEA. We definitely took lots of pictures of furniture and organization ideas, but no pictures of us.

We then drove north to Lake Bluff to eat dinner at The Silo. We love, love, love their Sidewalk Fries!

After dinner, we headed a bit further north, into Wisconsin. We drove to the waterfront in Kenosha. Lake Michigan was beautiful - even prettier with the setting sun as a backdrop!

Alex and I got out and walked around the harbor a bit.

We left the lakeshore and headed back towards I-94 to shop at Kohl's and get gas (much cheaper in Wisconsin than IL) before heading back to the suburbs. 

Once checked in to our hotel, we looked at the weather for Sunday and decided to give the Cub's game a try. We purchased our tickets and went to bed - what a wonderful day of shopping, eating, talking and time together!

We checked out of the hotel Sunday morning and headed to a local dollar store to grab some water bottles and snacks for the game. We then started heading towards Wrigley. After 2 years off (thanks to Covid), the remote (free) parking lot and bus shuttle service had started to operate again! This is such a nice bonus for weekend & weeknight games!

We parked and hopped on the bus - ready to watch our Cubbies play ball!

Unfortunately, our seats were in the shade for the full game. We would've liked to have had the sun shining down on us a bit since the temps were on the colder side. Luckily, we had brought our jackets so that helped. 

We jumped out to a 3-0 lead after a base clearing triple by P.J. Higgins in the 2nd inning. By the 7th inning, we were down 4-3. We had an exciting ending to our game though, when Wisdom and Schwindel hit back to back homeruns to take the lead into the 9th inning! We closed out the 9th for the W! An exciting game for sure!

Alex and I headed back to the busses to get a ride to the remote parking lot. We hit the road for home, arriving home around 9. It was a wonderful weekend - celebrating Alex's 16th birthday...2 years later!