Hickory and the Windy City collide

Amanda and Marcie rolled into Chicago around 8:30 p.m. Tuesday night with one thing on their minds – deep dish Chicago-style pizza. And boy, oh boy, did Ryan (Marcie’s cousin, with whom they crashed at his wicked cool apartment) deliver.

The trio hopped in Ryan’s VW and headed out toward the Chicago Pizza and Grinders on Clark Street. Marcie and Amanda still aren’t sure exactly where that is in relation to everything else in Chicago, but we picked up some fun facts. For example, the Valentine’s Day Massacre (a mobster thing in the 1920s) took place across the street and rumor has it that Al Capone’s hoodlums hid out in what is now the pizza place waiting to shoot.

But before we could learn all this fun stuff about the joint, we had to wait. It was cool, though, because any place that has a 45-minute wait for dinner at 9 p.m. on a Tuesday is a pretty safe culinary bet, usually. And in that wait time something very cool went down. We were chillin’ outside, drinking a beer and chatting with this girl with a Southern accent about something. Don’t remember what, but the conversation led to where everyone was from and went something like this.

Julie (the southern chick): Where ya’ll from?

Amanda: North Carolina.

Julie: Me too!

Amanda and Marcie, in unison: Where?

Julie: Hickory.

Amanda and Marcie, yelling way louder than ever necessary when someone says “Hickory”: NOOOOO WAY!!!!

Turns out Julie was just in the Windy City for some sort of training and just recently moved to Hickory. And, she patrons Copperbean, Amanda’s place of employment, and knew that Amanda works the a.m. shift. (“That’s why you look familiar!” Julie giggled.) So that was fun, and of course, we had to document it. So here is Amanda and Julie posing in front of where the Hickory connection discovery went down.

Anyhow, so the pizza. It wasn’t the “traditional” deep dish but oh-so-yummy. They take this ball of dough and stick the ingredients into a bowl, which they then stick into the dough upside down. Cook for a bit, take it out, cut off the bowl, and ta-da! Pizza. Here’s Ryan enjoying his.
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All three of us could only make it through ½ the pizza, which was OK because it made for an awesome leftover lunch Wednesday. So, how about we finally get to Wednesday? Enough words already, we know, more photos! So we took the Chicago River Tour at Navy Pier. We know we said we weren’t going to do the typical touristy junk, but this was fun. So here’s the pier. Wow, fancy.

And rather than give ya’ll the whole commentary on the tour, we’ll provide interesting fun facts about the buildings lining the river. This may one day help you on Jeopardy, so pay attention.

*There are 52 bridges on the Chicago River.

*The Merchandise Mart, built in 1930, was the largest in the world when it was completed. In the 1940s, however, those Washington bigwigs knocked it from its top spot when they built the Pentagon.

*The Sears Tower has its own zip code and 104 elevators.

*The top floor of the Lincoln Tower is only 9-feet wide.

*The Blummer Chocolate Factory is just off the river and it smelled delicious. We wanted chocolate after that. But that probably won’t help you on any quiz shows. This could, though: At one time there were eight candy factories in Chicago and the city provided 1/3 of all candy in the United States.

Merchandise Mart.

Amanda and Marcie. Duh.

The fanmous L (or elevated) train and the Chicago skyline.

The Lincoln Tower.

The Tribune Building and a hotel, which was originally built by the Shriners as a temple. (That's the one with the big yellow ball on it.)

The Chicago Tribune Building. The lobby was very pretty.

But the true highlight of the day was finding Slurpees. Fantastic. (NOTE: There are NO 7-Elevens in North Carolina. This has made Marcie’s last two years very difficult, thus prompting mass excitement when she finds a Coke Slurpee.) After finishing our cups on sheer happiness (aka the Slurpees), we wandered down the Magnificent Mile (oodles of shops) and decided to check out the Chicago Tribune Building. Very pretty and fancy. See?

Then we bid farewell to Chicago and like Jack, hit the road, and headed to Madison, WI. Stay tuned.