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Saturday, November 2nd – Sunday, November 3rd, 2024

Before kicking off our ‘world tour’ we decided to come to Chicago a day earlier than our flight to spend one last 24 hours in the USA with Nick’s family. Usually on our trip itineraries I would refer to this as Day 0: technically not the start but getting us warmed up.

We started the evening of the 2nd off by having dinner at the Roister, an American restaurant in the West Fulton Market area. The area has lots of places to eat and drink and dinner was amazing. Would highly recommend.

Sunday morning we had breakfast at Wildberry Pancakes & Cafe, the location adjacent to the Millennium Park. The lines are long but tend to go pretty quick, it’s a breakfast making machine in there. They’ve got excellent fluffy American pancakes.

The weather was unusually pleasant for this time of year so we walked around Millennium Park where we posed with the infamous Cloud Gate, more commonly referred to as “The Bean”. There were races going on so there were a ton of people everywhere, made for great people watching.

After Cloud Gate we made our way over to the Art Institute of Chicago, which is only a few minutes by foot. We think it’s worth it though if you have several hours to kill in the city. We spent about 2 hours there, but you could easily spend more than that if you wanted to see everything. It has some famous pieces such as Vincent van Gogh’s Self Portrait, Grant Wood’s American Gothic, Georges Seruat’s A Sunday on La Grande Jatte, and works from Pablo Picasso and Monet to name a few. The outside of the museum is also cool with large lion statues on either side of the entrance.

We finished off our 24 hours in Chicago with classic deep dish pizza from Giordano’s before heading off to the airport to formally start our trip.