Stop 1 - Chicago, Illinois

We set off from Carmarthen by taxi on Tuesday afternoon at 3.00pm. We caught the 3.10pm from Carmarthen and arrived at Paddington 4 hours later. Then on to the Heathrow Express from where we caught a bus and got to our hotel at 8.30pm. From there a 2mile hike to buy a bucket of KFC!!
It was better than staying in the hotel which was dreadful - no bedding, only 2 pillows between 4 of us and a fire alarm that had us evacuated at 4am!
Anyway, a bus to the airport at 9am had us safely on board our flight which left on time at 1pm. We arrived in Chicago 8½ hours later - 9.30 UK time but a new time for us of just 3.30pm!
Picked up our rental car and drove into the heart of downtown Chicago. Checked in at the Holiday Inn Mart Plaza by 5pm. The hotel was excellent. Look at the view from our hotel window:

 We thought we'd better go out rather than sleep (which we of course all really wanted to) so out we went for a long walk. It was great. Chicago is just a huge, TALL, awesome city! We stayed out until dark, wandering around the hustle, bustle and sights of the city.

When we got back to the hotel we just had to take another photo of the view - at night

That was it for day one. Off to bed by 10pm which was of course 4am UK time.

We awoke at about 6am! We had breakfast and were out into the city again by 9am. We visited the Sears Tower (now called the Willis Tower) which was until recently the tallest building in the world. We travelled in a lift 103 floors at 60 mph to the top of the tower where we stood on the "SkyDeck". If we thought the view from the hotel room was amazing......well.....

There is a glass platform that actually extends 4 feet outside this building and onto which one can walk! This means you are standing, on glass, outside the tallest building in the world and just looking straight down to the ants (people) below. I cant describe the effect this had on certain parts of my anatomy! But here is Sean lying on the glass floor as I took a photo of him

After this experience it was back to Terra Firma and another long walk through the city and to the famous Field Museum where we spent the whole of the rest of the day. It was amazing. Not only did we see Sue, the world's largest and near complete (90%) T Rex skeleton but we also visited the Egyptian Mummies and Genghis Khan exhibitions as well as countless others where we learned of planetary evolution, Darwinism, the science of DNA, of soil and life 3 inches underground. I could go on. We did!
Not so many pictures in the museum unfortunately. They were not allowed. Here is one of the boys standing next to Sue..

That was really the end of day two. The next day we began the Route 66 journey proper. We would leave from Chicago, drive through those streets we'd so far only walked (trepidation about that!) and make our way to our first stop in Springfield Illinois. More of that in the next post....