Azuki Panda

[Note: This blog was created a few weeks after the actual trip]

3/9/2009

This is the first year that I’ve actually done something for Spring Break so Steven and I decided to pick a spot to go to and plan a week around it. I haven’t been to Canada since middle school so I thought it might be fun to go to Toronto. Steven had to go back home first so then we thought, “Why not go to Chicago as well?” Once the locations were decided we thought about who else we wanted to come, so we ended up inviting Andrew, Lily, Justine, and Kenneth to go on the trip. The main problem we encountered was transportation since there were a total of 6 of us going and a sedan only fits 5 at the max. We thought about renting a minivan through Enterprise, but the plan fell through since you need someone who is at least 25 in order to rent a minivan. Another plus of having the minivan would be that I wouldn’t have to drive the entire trip. I’m the only one that can drive my ‘99 Nissan Altima since it’s a manual transmission. Kenneth was hesitant about driving his pickup truck since they have never driven in icy conditions before and well, Canada is known for being pretty cold. 2 days before the actual trip we were still trying to figure out the transportation situation and finally Kenneth agreed to drive his pickup since there was basically no other way to get everyone to go on the trip unless he drove.

The second hurdle for planning the trip was what we were going to do for each day. Many thanks to Steven for his hard work in organizing the trip. We threw around a lot of different ideas for things to do such as skydiving, skiing, and winery/brewery tours. We ditched the skydiving since it was fairly expensive and we wanted to keep the expense for the trip at a reasonable amount. We also had to decide on how many days we were going to stay in Chicago before heading up to Toronto. The final plan was to drive to Chicago on Monday, eat dinner with Steven’s parents and watch a comedy show that night. Tuesday would be spend seeing stuff in Chicago and also go to Chinatown. We would drive up to Michigan on Wednesday and go skiing, then drive at night until we get to London, Canada which was a halfway point between the skiing in Michigan and Toronto. Thursday we would drive to Toronto and spend the rest of the day skiing. Friday and Saturday were more open ended and even up until the start of the trip we were not quite sure what we would do in Toronto for two days other than maybe go see the CN tower.

Day one of the trip was mostly spent driving to Chicago, which is approximately a 6 hour drive. We were planning on meeting up with Justine and Kenneth after I pick up Lily and Andrew at around 9 AM, but being my usual self, I was late and it ended up being more like 9:15 before we left. The drive was fairly uneventful, with me leading in front even though both of the cars had GPS (I have a TomTom ONE). The entertainment for the trip was TextTwist courtesy of Andrew’s iPod Touch. It’s actually fairly difficult to do when you’re driving since you have to visualize all of the letters in your head so I mostly just concentrated on trying to get the 6-letter word. Lily was surprisingly good at it, getting the 6-letter word 3 times in a row within 5-10 seconds of seeing the letters and most other times getting it fairly fast.

We arrived at Steven’s house in Chicago at around 3 PM and sat around watching TV until around 5 PM, at which time we headed out to dinner. Steven has talked about Giordano’s numerous times and it was nice to actually see for myself if it was truly as good as he makes it out to be. Chicago style pizza, for anyone who does not know, is a deep dish pizza that is about 2 inches thick. Steven and I have been told that we eat a lot compared to other people, and even so we can only eat about 3 slices each. Trying to get something that everyone would like, we got one with spinach and one that was a supreme style one. It’s interesting to note that Chicago style pizza has cheese at the bottom, then ingredients in the middle, then another layer of cheese, and finally the tomato sauce. Both of the pizzas were very delicious.

Thank you Steven’s parents for treating us to such a wonderful dinner!.

At night we went to Second City to see a comedy show. It was mostly small 2-3 minute segments performed by a group of around 8 people. It’s a traveling show so they perform across the country and they even have shows on cruises. The actors were fairly versatile, having at least 2 acts where they asked for a topic from the audience and used it to improv a song or skit. It might help to note here that Second City is well known for producing many comedians such as Dan Aykroyd, Dave Foley, and Mike Myers. Their improv song was not quite as good as the “Whose Line” ones but it wasn’t bad.

Steven mentioned that the best view of Chicago is from the Shedd Aquarium so we drove out there after the show, but much to our chagrin the road to the Shedd was closed. I tried to take a picture out of the car window as we were stopped at a red light but since it’s at night and I didn’t use a tripod it came out kind of blurry.

When we got back to Steven’s house we found that due to the rainy weather and generally warmer than expected temperatures many of the Michigan ski resorts were closed for the next few days. Guess what? The one we had planned on going to was on that list. We desperately hoped that it was just closed for Tuesday and would reopen on Wednesday since the next closest one would be at least a few hours detour.

 
 
 
All of the pictures together: