Road Trip Day 5

I awoke to Day 5 in a nice comfy bed at a friend's house. After a delicious breakfast of fresh cinnamon buns, we made our way over to another friend's house, along with the couple we'd stayed with, and the five of us began our journey to Chicago. We stopped along the way at a food court place that was built over top the highway, which is a neat idea. We had Taco Bell, which was fun because the boys usually tease me that they're going to Taco Bell at around midnight their time, and I quite frankly cannot do the same, nor obviously join in the fun. Oddly, the menu item I usually order here is not the same in Wisconsin. There's a bean paste in there instead of rice (bean paste is, I will admit, the more normal thing to expect in a burrito, but rice is more interesting and also the reason I choose this particular menu item in my own city).

We continued our way to Chicago, where we went to the Museum of Science and Industry, which was a lot more like a learning center than an actual museum, though the place was home to several artifacts, which were cool to see. There were some old cars there, including a model T. We took several pictures, but mostly they turned out too dark to see much of anything. We saw a giant model train set up, which was cute. We saw baby chicks hatching, which kind of broke my heart, really. Those poor little creatures were hatched with no mama chicken around. Those chicks came into the world utterly alone, save for the other scared, alone chicks hatching near enough the same time. Anyways... *hrmph* One of the displays was a cool submarine, which was captured by Americans during WWII. That was pretty neat to see. There was also a working coal mine, but due to line up sizes and the fact that the museum closed an hour early that day, we did not check it out.

When the museum closed, we parted ways with my friends and took off to find a hotel. Unlike most of our trip, we didn't se any hotels off the side of the highway while we were in Chicago, so we stayed on the main drag for a while before deciding to just continue onward, so we ended up just going around Lake Michigan and onward to... Kalamazoo! Kalamazoo is the friendliest place ever, I think. Everyone was genuinely friendly, not just service-friendly. We told the clerk at the hotel lobby that we were staying in Kalamazoo that night purely because of the name of the city, and he was so delighted, he gave us a discount. As we settled into our room, dusk fell upon us, and brought with it fireflies. This was our first time ever seeing fireflies, and they were very neat. It's hard to believe there's a creature whose butt lights right up, but we've seen them with our own eyes. That night we watched Harry Potter, which was the opening night, and we watched it for $5 each, no line-ups, and we strolled in about 6 minutes before showtime. That was interesting. We scrutinized the tickets after the show and found they'd given us student pricing (hehe).