Chicago to St Louis

My first moving day was today, and since my flight was at the very civilised time of 12.55pm, I didn't have to leave early.  I'd already checked in the night before, but calculated that I should leave around 10.30am, and 11am at the latest, to get to the airport on time.

After a slight disagreement with Google Maps when I arrived in Chicago, where it pointed me in the wrong direction completely so I ended up taking 20 minutes to get to the hotel and going twice as far as necessary, I'd already checked the route for departure - it was three blocks walk straight down Clark St from my hotel and into the CTA Clark/Lake station.

I left at 10.50am, which should have been fine, but I must have just missed a train, as I had to wait 8 minutes for the next one.  The train should take 38 minutes to get to its terminus at O'Hare, but it took over an hour due to people working on the line and then some other issue that required the driver to walk all the way down the train to the back to fix something and then back again, which happened at two stations en route, before we sat just outside O'Hare station for 5 minutes for no apparent reason.

So I arrived at the airport just after 12.05pm,  walked to terminal 1 and pretty much straight through the TSA pre-check fast-track security, which with new added facial recognition that I've enabled, meant I didn't even have to show my passport to anybody and didn't have to unpack anything - much easier for all concerned.

As per usual, the gate for my plane was almost as far away from the security checkpoint as it could be, and when I got there, group 1 had already finished boarding and group 2 was starting.  Fortunately, there was a separate queue for the groups, so I could walk past everybody and straight on.

The flight is very short, so it only took about 45 minutes - there was barely time for a drink of coffee en route before we were coming in to land in St Louis.

Finding the Metrolink station at the airport is tricky, as the signs disappear at the vital point and you have to notice the sideways-on sign that you walk underneath that points in a different direction.  However, the train came and dropped me off right outside the hotel, which is very convenient.

My room is huge - the photo doesn't really do it justice, but that's a king-size bed and another one of them would easily fit beween the foot of it and the TV stand on the right and probably another 2 or 3 alongside it.

It's also the first hotel room I've had that I can remember that has an actual bath in the bathroom.  There is also a separate walk-in shower. 

 I've bought my tickets for tonight's game and tomorrow's game, because I got 10% off if I bought both days at the same time.  I'm going to see about just going to the ticket window at the stadium for the weekend series games, because that should be even cheaper without all the ticket convenience fees.

I went to a Ruth's Chris steakhouse for dinner - once I found the way in was inside the attached Hyatt hotel.  It was expensive and the food was good, but possibly not worth such a high price.  I had a better filet mignon in Chicago than this one, at that much cheaper!  On the way, I passed through a park with this nicely-framed view of the famous arch.

Somewhat bizarrely, when I was speaking to the host at breakfast in Chicago this morning, she was convinced that they'd only just finished building the arch a couple of years ago whilst I said I thought it was completed in the 1960s.  I've checked and I was right!