Chicago - September 2019

Our New House in Chicago

We were in Chicago for the weekend to close on our house.  Keith was already there for work while Shawna flew in on Thursday evening, in time to have dinner with Keith at the hotel where we shared a salad and an entree - both were surprisingly good.  We stayed at the W Hotel City Center which is a nice hotel that is conveniently located on the west side of downtown close to Keith's office.

We closed on Friday morning, taking only 45 minutes to sign all of the documents.  Our agent, Violet, met us there and gave us a bottle of Dom to celebrate the occasion.  We then went over to the house where Shawna took a quick look before meeting up with the designer, Karin, to go shopping for kitchen island stone.  Keith stayed at the house, meeting with ADT and taking work calls.  Our mortgage broker bought us pizza for lunch which she had delivered to the house.  Shawna and Karin arrived back at the house early afternoon and met with one of the construction guys to walk through all the changes - needless to say there was some scope creep involved!  Tired from a long day, we returned to the hotel and ordered room service - soup and salad!

On Saturday, we worked out and then had Starbucks for breakfast.  We went to the house again to take measurements of rooms and grabbed a quick lunch on the way to the house at Goddess and Grocer, one of our new neighborhood cafes.  We then walked the 606 (a high-line walk way connecting Bucktown to the neighborhoods West) all the way to the end, about 2.5 miles and then walked back part of the way, exiting to walk North to Logan Square to check out that area.  We were not as impressed, despite the fact that there are supposed to be good restaurants there.  We took the train back to the hotel and cleaned up for dinner.  That evening, we had a yummy meal at Proxi, a cool restaurant in West Loop that services global cuisine.  We started with a gin and tonic (which was great) and then shared several small plates (melon & cucumber chaat, crispy Vietnamese crepe and black pepper port), a bottle of wine and tres leches for dessert with port.

Dinner at Proxi

On Sunday, we worked out and had Starbucks again for breakfast.  We hung out in the room most of the morning catching up on personal items.  We then went to Ramen-San for ramen which was very good and saw Ad Astra which was quite slow!  We walked back to the hotel where we picked up our luggage and went our separate ways - Shawna going to O'Hare to fly to Hartford for work and Keith to Midway to fly to Atlanta.