Day 1 - We've arrived in Chicago

We arrived in Newark Airport, New Jersey, at 11:30am (local time), after a 7 and half hour flight from Dublin. Making a very quick connection and another 2 hour flight we touched town in Chicago around 3pm local time, which is American Central Time, 6 hours behind Ireland.

Getting off the flight, the heat hit us. WOW, this place is warm. As our flight was an internal domestic flight, we waltzed through into baggage reclaim. No security or passport control. What was strange - the baggage reclaim point is open to the general public!

Heading to the Airport CTA station (the local version of our CIE), we picked up a seven day unlimited bus and rail pass for $20. Not bad, works out less than €15 for the whole week. Taking the Blue Train to Jackson, we transferred to Red to Chicago and walked the remaining three blocks to the hotel.

Our Hotel is right beside the famous John Hancock Centre. We've a fab apartment hotel. It's massive. We've a very large bed, separate sitting room with three sofas and large cable (70+channel) TV. Our kitchen is very well equipped with oven, stove top, microwave, electric can opener, toaster, coffee maker, LARGE fridge and our sink is equipped with a garbage disposal unit. AMAZING! The hotel has a small gym and roof terrace.

After settling in, we headed out to Michigan Avenue and the magnificent mile. It's the main shopping street. It's beautiful, but warm, almost 28Degrees at 7pm! We snacked at Panda Express (We loved there last year in San Francisco), and Patrick even got to play with the Apple iPhone in the apple store.

Heading to Wallgreens, we picked up some food for breakfast. We'll do a full shop tomorrow. We even got a voucher entitling us to a free Vanilla Coke Zero (Pats in Heaven!).

A storm is on the way tonight, it's already thunder and lightening outside. It's nothing like the storms back home, the skies are alight. We're heading to bed early to recover from a very long day travelling. We're very excited about discovering this new city.