Night time architecture

After the game, I went to dinner and then I walked around and took more photos of the centre of Chicago at night.

There are residential blocks as well as a lot of businesses, but I'm sure that not all of these lights really need to be on, but it does make it pretty.

The Riverwalk, on the right hand side in this first picture, is lively with lots of music going on - although it all closes at 11pm, thankfully, as I could hear it all inside my hotel room, just on the left-hand side of this picture!

 There are still a large number of river tour boats going up and down all through the evening and they were all packed with people.

 

The captains of these vessels need to have their wits about them, as the river is full of pleasure craft and also groups of people in kayaks.

 

That looks a bit dodgy during the day, but it looked positively dangerous at night time with each kayak have a tiny little light on it.  At least the people sailing in an actual boat probably know what they are doing, but the kayakers seemed to be novices, with maybe one or two guides trying to keep them all safe!

 

Here's a few more pictures of the night-time skyline and me.

 

 

New York Yankees @ Chicago White Sox (game 3)

 The final game of this series was a day game, as usual for a Sunday.  Only the game scheduled for the national TV audience on Sunday Night Baseball tends to be an evening game.

I'd taken heed of the notes that said to make sure you sit on the first base side in day games, and I was glad of that advice, because the third base side was in full sun for the whole game and it would have been very hot, whereas the first base side was in shade.  It was quite pleasant, with the occasional gust of chilly wind which was refreshing.

Finally, I saw the White Sox hit a home run (Colson Montgomery and Lenyn Sosa) which set the fireworks off behind the scoreboard, although the scoreboard seemed to be having a tough day as it failed midway through the game and didn't seem to come back even after it was rebooted.

All of that came after Aaron Judge belted home run number 43 in the first inning to get off to another start.  Next time up, he was a few inches away from sitting a second homer as the ball just hit the top of the wall and came back into play for "only" a double.  He's still caught Yogi Berra, a famous old great Yankees catcher from back in the day.  I still think of his as a relatively new player in the major leagues, but this is his tenth season overall. 

However, it wasn't enough, as the White Sox managed to hang on to take the game 3-2 in 2 and a half hours - much better than the Friday game which was just like a few years ago, where the game took over 3 hours despite being just 9 innings long.  That was about the same length as Saturday's game that went 11 innings.

New York Yankees @ Chicago White Sox (game 2)

The second game of my holiday was another evening game, which was nice as it kept most of the day free for exploring the city.

Tonight, I saw Aaron Judge hit a home run, his 42nd of the season.  The one thing that's even more noticable when you're seeing him in person is that he is a large human being.  When he goes to the plate to take his at-bat, before they all get set for a pitch, you see him standing next to the opposition catcher and the umpire, and he dwarfs them.

This game was very close - much closer than the night before and it ended up 3-3 after the 9 innings, so it went into extra innings.

The White Sox nearly won this in the 10th inning - they got the initial running to 3rd base with only 1 out, but weren't able to score him to win the game.

Unfortunately for Chicago, the wheels really game off in the 11th inning as New York managed to score 3 runs, which put the game out of reach, as even the runner-starting-on-2nd didn't help Chicago, because New York didn't have to care about him as they were just too far ahead.

In the end, the Yankees just about managed to hold on to this one 5-3 in the end with Doval, the former Giants closer making it "interesting" in the 11th inning.  It was funny watching the New York fans in the stands starting to tear their hair out in frustration at Doval - well, welcome to the club, as you should have known what you were getting when you traded for him!

Navy Pier

Today I spent walking around a bit more.  I decided to go to the lakefront, which isn't all that far away from my hotel - probably less than a mile, and you can go along the Riverwalk for most of it, which is nicer than the normal streets above with all the traffic on them.

It was another pleasant summer day, and not too hot.  

On the way, I came across a large plaza with an mini-exhibition in it - it was the Lego Formula 1 display, featuring a Red Bull Formula 1 car made, obviously, out of Lego.  These really are well done and look so realistic from not that great a distance.

That was the star attraction, although that had a model-building area for children to make their own cars or anything else.

After that, I went for a walk along to Navy Pier, which is a pleasure pier that juts out into Lake Michigan.

There are plenty of statues, floral displays and fountains to be seen, plus the amusement arcades and fast-food restaurants.

Everywhere remains really busy as this is the final weekend of the official summer holidays for Americans, so many families were making the most of the final opportunity of going somewhere.

It was quite tricky to get photographs without lots of people in the backgrounds. 

The pier is just slightly north of the centre of town.  It has a private marina on its north side and the delta of the Chicago river on its south side, so it is possible to get good photos of the Chicago skyline - or at least the Southern part of it!

There is a walking and cycling trail that runs along the shoreline.  There's local laws that prevent any buildings that are not public amenities from being built anywhere near the shoreline, which has helped keep it all open and accessible.

New York Yankees @ Chicago White Sox (game 1)

The first game of my holiday was more of a "traditional" game, in that this took over 3 hours to play out in total, mainly due to the drawn out innings that New York kept having, with so many pitches thrown by the Chicago pitchers.  I lost count of how many Yankees were walked during the course of the game, but it must have been close to double figures.  Despite all of that it was close until Grisham's grand slam in the middle innings that put New York up 5-0 and it was never close after that.

It was "Puerto Rico Heritage" night, so there was a lot of PR signs and things going on in between innings.

Friday is also the traditional day for teams to have fireworks displays, and tonight was no exception.  We had a wonderful 15 minute display of fireworks after the game.

They keep some of the stadium lighting on during the display, but switch off the main stadium floodlights.

Now that the floodlights are LED, they don't need to fade out or in any more, so they can switch off them for the display and then immediately reilluminate the park at the end so that people can see where they're going as they leave safely.

 

Chicago Riverwalk

I walked the length of the Chicago Riverwalk today.  It's only just over a mile long but it runs along the southern bank of the river out to the lake, passing under several bridges.

Although it's one long pathway, it's divided into sections by all the bridges.  You can always get up onto the bridges so it's easy to navigate around.

There are lots of bars and cafes and restaurants all along the route.  

There are a few seating areas too, and even an area for fishing, although given the amount of traffic passing on the river, I'd be surprised if there was any chance of them catching anything!

I was surprised at how busy it was, with a lot of river tour boats running, most of them fairly full.

Then I remembered that it's not yet Labor Day, so it's still officially "summer" and lots of Americans are still taking their summer holidays.

I imagine once I get to St Louis next week, it will be significantly quieter everywhere, although that also means that some of the attractions and other things will have started to wind down.

 

 

Dinner was at McCormick and Schmick's restaurant which is just across the river from my hotel. 

Afterwards, I went down to this evening's ballgame. 

I have struggled to buy a ticket so far, for a number of reasons.  This is a highly unusual problem.  I wanted to look on StubHub for cheaper re-sale tickets but it sent me around in circles where it wouldn't let me login, then wouldn't send me a password reset email, and also refused to create a new account as it said my email address was in use.  The live support person said that the email address wasn't in use.

Then I finally worked out that it's because I have an account on stubhub.co.uk with my email address attached to it and stubhub.com and stubhub.co.uk are separate in almost everything, except it seems in account databases.

I don't think Ticketmaster likes the hotel's wi-fi Internet connection - attempts to sign in fail with it telling me that my browser looks suspicious and that I ought to sign in or use a different network.  Fortunately, when I use my phone to log in not via the hotel wi-fi, it works OK and I was able to buy a ticket for this evening's game.

 

 

Journey to Chicago

This started with a mild panic that gradually subsided through the day.

I woke up to find my preferred train had been cancelled.  It would have got me to Heathrow by 11:10, which is 3 hours before my flight, so there was plenty of leeway.  At Cambridge North, the ticket machines refused to sell me the tickets I wanted, despite the two Greater Anglia employees minding the machines telling me it would, until I demonstrated it wouldn't and they said, well no of course you can't do that.  So I had to pay an extra £15 to get to Heathrow instead and make an extra change at Cambridge.  That train was OK, and pretty empty, until Stevenage, when it filled up with people who presumably had been wanting the earlier cancelled train.  The Elizabeth line train was lovely and got me to the airport not much later than I had intended.

My boarding pass did not work the gate at security.  When the man tried it in his, it didn't work there first time, but did the second time.  After that, I was able to go straight through without queueing or unpacking anything and embark on the long walk to the B-gates at the other end of the terminal.  My boarding pass did not work the scanner at the lounge entrance either, but then the lady pointed out that I needed to tap on it with my finger first, which makes it larger and brighter - after which scanners can read it easilty!  They'd stopped serving breakfast in the lounge, as it was around midday by them, so they'd moved onto a light lunch instead.   The coffee was nice.

I had to show my passport and boarding pass at the game to board the plane, and that's the last time I used my passport!

The plane was a Dreamliner - it doesn't really make any difference to the seat, as that's a standard unit that gets installed in whatever plane, but I liked the electronic window blinds that darkened the view to almost opaque: (Link to video)  They went even darker than the video showed. The food was good as usual, including the favourite ice cream sundae.

The Polaris section of the plane had 44 seats and I'd estimate it was not even half full.   I was able to sleep about 3 hours in total during this flight, which was unusual for me, but welcome.

Once we actually got to the gate, it took 10 minutes to be through everything into the main terminal.  There was a short walk, then I had to just look at a screen, tap that I was a tourist and it went green and go through, collecting a (fairly tatty) laminated card to say I'd been approved that I handed in as I pass through customs.  This is much better than printing out disposable receipts!

I got to the hotel at about 7pm in the end and had dinner there, sitting outside (next to the warmers!) with these views over the Chicago river.   There was some sort of party bar on the opposite river bank but that switched off at 10pm thankfully, as I could hear it from my 6th floor room.