KK's Adventures Day 3

Today we ventured forth to Lincoln Park. But first: Breakfast!

This concoction is called Goldenrod Eggs. It's a family recipe of L's, who apparently thought for many years that it was GoldenROT Eggs. It's hardboiled eggs with the chopped egg whites mixed with something or other--milk is one of the ingredients--and spread on toast. The yolks are pressed through a sieve, and I don't actually know if they're seasoned. We have this at least once on each trip. Today it's accompanied by sausage and fruit salad.

After breakfast we had a long and rousing discussion about the CTA and Ventra and most of us ended up downloading the Ventra app and loading a day pass onto it so we could meander about acting like we knew what the hell we were doing. This was marginally successful, but only marginally.

Anyway, we tried the bus instead of the train, and it went relatively well. We ended up here:

Sadly, it was closed. I did get a couple of neat pics outside it, though.

Storm damage from recent events, I assume. Illinois has set a record for the most tornadoes in one tornado season, and it's still going, so...yeah.

I do not know what this flower is, but it's pretty. L says her mom used to have one at her house and she hated it, but it was unkillable.

Thwarted in our mission to visit the Conservatory, we continued south (north? I think it was south...) to the Lincoln Park Zoo. First we passed through a lovely park area with a ginormous fountain. There were children everywhere doing children things and being Quite Loud about it.

The fountain from a distance.

This is part of the fountain. According to the bus tour narrator, the trumpeter swans in the fountain represent the first two animals gifted to the zoo, by the Central Park Zoo in New York. Apparently, they were mute. They were non-trumpeting trumpeter swans.

The middle section of the fountain.

Eventually, we reached the Zoo. There were some seals.

None of the seals were very cooperative and apparently didn't want to have their pictures taken.

Seal butt.

This was a cool water fountain outside the cat house. These were the only lions we saw. As far as a zoo-denizen-viewing experience, this trip was disappointing. It was noon, and although it wasn't that hot, it was a weekday full of summer camp field trips, screaming children, and zoo workers cleaning the habitats, so the animals probably decided to take the opportunity to nap. We also didn't cover the entire zoo. We are old, and some of us were tired.

Zebra butt. There's a theme here.

This was a cool fountain. You can't quite tell, but it's a globe with animals carved into their native countries. The water runs down the globe and then down the pedestal. Children find themselves unable to keep from touching it. I mean, I also touched it, so no shade, small children.

A polar bear. There were big hunks of meat hung in the enclosure, so it was obviously feeding time. This guy seemed pretty chill, rather than vaguely miserable as this photo implies. He was in the process of stretching out in the comfy grass.

We ate lunch at the zoo. The food was actually pretty good for a zoo bar and grill. I had a smoked turkey sandwich, which came with BBQ chips that looked and tasted like the kind you get that are made on-site at fancy-ish restaurants. The grill soundtrack sounded like a Zumba class, so I spent a lot of my lunch wriggling in my seat trying to remember the choreography to songs I recognized.

Oh, of course I find the picture of the zoo entry sign last.

After the zoo, we split up, and some of us braved the bus again to go to the Andersonville Galleria. This is basically a multi-story craft fair stuffed with products from local artists. It was very cool, but I didn't have to energy to visit more than two floors. I think there are three floors and a mezzanine. They had several Pride displays, and the whole place was across the board very queer-friendly. In fact, I got the impression that Andersonville itself is very queer-friendly (I'm not a local, I could be wrong, but I did see a LOT of LGBTQ folks wandering about being comfortably obvious about their LGBTQ-ness). I've linked the neighborhood guide.