I finally caught a small lull in the work action with a break in all the ships this weekend (which I’ll make up for today) so yesterday, with my parents in town, we decided to play the tourist.
Gorgeous suggested we check out the Ships of the Sea Museum since I like things nautical. And it was a good time. The most impressive thing there was all the scale ship models they had from various periods. Everything from sailing square-riggers through iron clad steamers. They had a model of the SS Savannah, the first steam powered ship to cross the Atlantic, and the NS Savannah, the first nuclear powered cargo chip ever built.
For ship buffs like me it was definitely worth the price of admission.
Then we went over to City Market so the ladies could do some shopping. Dad and I tried to entertain ourselves but found it challenging.
Since Mom really wanted to go eat at Lady & Sons, Dad and I decided we’d go get in line.
Now Paula Deen (the owner of the restaurant) is a sharp business woman and a class act all the way. Mom’s dentist had told her to be sure to check out the place. I’m guessing he heard about it on the food channel. I’ve eaten there a couple times before, when folks come to visit who specifically want to go there.
The down side of going there (and it is a big one) is that the line to get in the place is almost always all the way down the block. And in the Savannah afternoon heat standing there in the sun is no fun. But Dad and I were willing to suck it up and stand there.
Until it started raining.
The bottom line is that there are way too many great restaurants in Savannah to go through all that just to get into one. Don’t get me wrong, the food is really good at Lady & Sons. Some might even say it’s worth the wait.
So we shifted gears and went back to City Market to Belford’s and had a wonderful meal there.
But I think the highlight of the day, at least for Mom, was our stop at a place that was not at all unique to Savannah. Gorgeous found out that they’d never been to a Bass Pro Shop so we stopped of at the mall to “show them the waterfall and the fish tank.”
The ladies spent over an hour trying on clothes while Dad and I entertained ourselves looking at the boats and making cracks about how little of the clothing we could actually see. (Most of it was so well camouflaged.)
Anyway it was a good day hanging out with my folks.
But now it’s back to work.
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The third gentleman at our party was a little older and spent some time in 
I knew I wanted to fill up the tank before I turned the car back in because I didn’t want to get soaked paying the rental company $5 a gallon for a less than full tank, or some such. Fortunately on the highway I was on had an 
The trick was the booth at the O’Hare exit. There is no operator at that exit. It is cash only, exact change required. But you have to be a bit of a detective to figure out how much the toll is because the only place it tells you is a little sign on the toll collecting machine itself. It happened to be $0.80 too.
Oh, we totally saw that one coming.
)
It got me thinking about how much control we really don’t have in our lives. I mean we can plan for all sorts of eventualities but in the end we just plain aren’t in charge of how things work out.
Sears Tower makes going up to their 
The view from the top is spectacular, as expected. There was a thunder shower off to the Southwest that gave us a spectacular lightning show. The sun was stetting off beyond O’Hare airport. I pointed out to the guy next to me that at nearly 1500 feet we were at the same altitude as the jets approaching the airport. He thought that was pretty cool. And there were lots of them. The jets were staggered in alternating pairs for the parallel westerly runways back across Lake Michigan as far as I could see.
Whew! It’s been a busy week so far. Lot’s of stuff to do. But looking at what we’ve got for the rest of the week, it looks like I might actually get a little down time. Gorgeous suggested I make sure I get some authentic Chicago style pizza while I’m up here. We definitely like our food, us Cree’s.
Going up in them to the observation area on a windy day you could feel the building sway in the wind. It was always cool to look down on the helicopters that were scurrying around the city.
airport waiting area has TV’s blaring and all of them are tuned to some news channel. All I heard about was Mid-East violence, Korea & Iran and nuclear weapons, Typhoons killing hundreds in China. Now I’m not a bury-my-head-in-the-sand-and-pretend it’s-all-going-to-be-OK kind of guy. I’m in touch with reality. But I definitely got a reminder why I don’t watch much television news coverage anymore. I can get all the news I need with a quick scan of the headlines online and see, “Yep. The world’s still a mess.†I don’t need some photogenic announcer telling me over and over how bad things are.
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