Rise and fall, on the wings of my dreams

It's the second post chronicling my trip to Chicago, so naturally I used the next line from the Perfect Strangers theme song as the post title.

We got back to our hotel pretty late Friday night after the Gaffigan show, so we slept in a little on Saturday. Since it was my birthday, Andrew and Will graciously let me set the agenda. When I travel, my days basically consist of finding things to do to fill time until I'm ready to eat again. Missing that first connecting flight from New York cost us half a day in Chicago that I was hoping to have, and as a result we ended up foregoing museums, parks, landmarks, architecture, all that Ferris Bueller stuff, in order to ensure I got the food that I wanted. As you'll see, I'm confident I had the right priorities.

Before the trip I had solicited restaurant recommendations from two friends who had lived in Chicago. Both insisted that I get pancakes at The Bongo Room, so we headed there for breakfast. I love the name--it sounds like the '50s and '60s equivalent of Hooters or some other tacky, tawdry, cheesy establishment. (The restaurant is not like that, but it's still a fun name.) As great as the name is, the food is even better. I got the red velvet pancakes. They were huge, which was fortunate, or I likely would've devoured them too quickly to remember to take a picture.

From there, we did actually try to do something touristy, but it was a 90+-minute wait to get up to the observation deck of the Willis (nee Sears) Tower, so we bailed and made our way to US Cellular Field to see the White Sox play the Twins (the Cubs were on the road that weekend, or you can bet we'd have gone to Wrigley). We got tickets in the highest deck but right behind home plate, so we had a good view. The highlight of the baseball action was correctly predicting what Adam Dunn would do to squash any Sox rallies (he is so unbelievably atrocious). But the ultimate highlight of the entire ballpark experience was getting my first-ever authentic Chicago-style hot dog. I had them "drag it through the garden," which is why you pretty much only see veggies here, but there was a dog underneath, and it was delicious.

It had been pretty cold at the game, so we stopped at our hotel to warm up for a bit and then headed back downtown for the food holy grail of this trip: deep-dish pizza. There are some who will say it's just a tourist thing, that it's not authentic Chicago pizza, but I don't care--it's a big delicious pizza and I wanted some. We chose Lou Malnati's (again, on my friends' recommendations), and a good choice it was.

Andrew told our server it was my birthday, and they comped us this big pizza-shaped cookie with ice cream! (Yes, I know most cookies are pizza-shaped.) It was a great way to end my birthday.

Sunday we spent literally all day in airports and on planes but eventually made it back to Utah. I'll have to go back to Chicago sometime to see all the things I missed--again, I have to do SOMETHING while I'm waiting to get hungry again.