J&J Adventures Part 2: Day 3 Chicago and our Divvy Bike tour

Monday, June 22

Day 76

Today is the day to try a different form of transportation. We walked a block and a half to a Divvy bike docking station, paid our $7.00 each for use of a bike for 24 hours and got a numeric code to unlock the bikes.

We hopped on and rode over toward the Lake Shore trail which runs 18 miles along the shores of Lake Michigan. This is a great system where there are docking stations all over the city. The trick is you have to dock your bike every 30 minutes, check back in with an automated system and get a new code to unlock the bike. If you go over, it costs $2.00 extra. We used the system all day, it was great.

The coolest thing is you don't have to worry about leaving your bike somewhere when you want to walk for awhile or go to lunch. You just dock it and come back or walk to a different docking station. Of course, there is a Divvy bike App with all the docking stations on it so you can find them. Really fun. We made our way downtown and elected to park and walk for awhile through the city again to take a few more pictures.

Piece of World Trade Center at the Tribune Tower

After going online and looking at the 149 artifacts from the post 2 days ago, we had to go back to the
Chicago Tribune Tower in search of more artifacts

Sculpture at Millennium Park

No Blackhawk Helmet today

After a coffee, revisiting Millennium Park, we got on some other bikes and continued our journey through the museum district, past Soldier Field and then onto the southern portion of the trail. They are doing native prairie plant restoration along there and there is a migratory bird corridor along the lake.

Prairie native plant restoration along Lake Michigan and the Lake Shore Trail

We docked the bikes for lunch and then rode to the University of Chicago parked and walked the campus. This is a fabulously beautiful campus! Although hard to capture the beauty with photographs, I tried. I told Jack that this campus made me wish I could go back to college. He reminded me I would have to study, write papers, and take tests. The Rockefeller Chapel was beautiful and there is another Frank Lloyd Wright house here, the William C. Robie house. They were offering tours but we did not have time. It looked very similar to the Darwin Martin house we toured in Buffalo.