After our East Coast trip, the plan was for Andrew to take Ellie to visit Loyola in Chicago and Marquette in Milwaukee. As it turned out, I ended up doing the trip with her. Ellie didn’t want to miss school to tour the colleges, and the only weekend where we could do both colleges didn’t work for Andy.
I decided we’d leave Friday night, spend the night in Chicago, tour Loyola on Sunday, then spend Saturday night in Milwaukee before touring Marquette Sunday. Ellie’s been leading the student section at her school football games, and there was a home game that Friday night. We agreed she would attend the first half of the game, and we’d leave directly from the school, which is more or less on the way to Chicago from our house. Within an hour I needed to use a restroom, so I pulled off at the main Lafayette exit. Ellie saw an IHOP sign and decided she was hungry for some pancakes, so we made a long-ish stop to get some pancakes to go.
The rest of the trip up was uneventful, save for a few crazy fast drivers that are the norm for the Chicago area. We stayed at the AC Hotel Chicago Downtown, on Rush Street a few blocks from Michigan Avenue. The hotel was not bad, although I paid a little extra for a corner room and got a room that seemed exactly like a non-corner room to us. Even though we gained an hour on the way up by changing time zones, it was still after midnight before we arrived at our hotel, and probably 1 am local time by the time I fell asleep.
Still, I woke up at seven, an hour before our alarmwhich is eight Indianapolis time and pretty late for me to sleep in. I got Ellie up at eight Chicago time, and we got ready and headed out for a bakery called Goddess and The Baker. I found it on Yelp and liked the menu and the pictures. It was as good as we hoped. Good food, good coffee, and gorgeous pastries.
After breakfast we had time for a walk on the Magnificent Mile, but unfortunately most everything was closed, so it was just a walk and no shopping. Over the summer Ellie had ordered a pair of shorts from Zara that were returned with the security tag still on them. She had brought them to take to the store since there isn‘t one in Indy, so we stopped there right when they opened at ten. There was a large crowd waiting for the store to open, and we were actually third in line at the checkout. Only one register was open because the other register lady couldn’t get her drawer to balance, and the woman in line ahead of us was probably returning twenty items, didn’t have her digital receipts ready, etc. I try for patience but often fail, and I failed big this time. I finally gave up and got the lady counting the drawer to help us before she opened the register. It’s kind of crazy that we got to the store before it opened and still had to wait ten or fifteen minutes for a 60-second interaction.
We checked out of our hotel and drove about fifteen minutes up Lakeshore Drive to Loyola. In my mind Loyola was more separated from the city than it actually is. It’s very much an urban campus that their promotional materials make look like it’s not. We parked in a garage and checked in for the tour about ten minutes before the scheduled 11 am start.
Loyola’s admission tour did not seem terribly well organized. For one thing, I had received a reminder email the day before that indicated, for the first time, that we needed to show proof of vaccination to tour. It took a little bit of time Friday to track down Ellie’s card, but we had it with us Saturday when we checked in. The people in front of us had not seen that sentence in the middle of the previous day’s email. I’m not sure they actually got to tour. Another example of poor organization is that they had everyone check in and wait, and then when a tour guide was assigned to the people in our area, a bunch of people waiting elsewhere joined our group, and it was too big to be very useful.
Our tour guide, Tim, was nice and moderately knowledgeable, but he didn’t seem to be able to answer questions outside his limited personal experience. There were also annoying people on tour with us. One dad talked too much, and another loudly took a phone call, separated from the rest of the group by only about ten feet. There was one mom with a Disney Dooney & Bourke bag like me, and when I pointed it out, her daughter said, “We made friends!” which sounded like something Ellie would say. We liked them, so not everyone was annoying, at least! Although Loyola is a Jesuit school, they didn’t talk at all about the Jesuit principles, and all-in-all Loyola is not high on Ellie’s list.
Not high on the list, but we visited the bookstore and got a sweatshirt anyway. There was a Tropical Smoothie Cafe right across the street from our parking garage, so we grabbed smoothies to drink on the drive north. Ellie wanted to do some shopping along the way, and I found an outlet mall about halfway between Chicago and Milwaukee. We stopped there and walked the entire thing (16,252 steps that day!). She talked me into buying a new handbag and wallet, and I got her a neat Coach purse that will be a Christmas present.
It was less than 45 minutes from the mall to downtown Milwaukee, and traffic was not bad. We checked into the Milwaukee Marriott Downtown. Since we’d more or less skipped lunch we were ready for an early dinner and visited the Swingin’ Door Exchange a few blocks away. It was a neat old pub. They, of course (because we were in Wisconsin) carried New Glarus beer, and I ordered a Spotted Cow. I haven’t had a steak in years, but the New York strip special sounded good, and it was. I also loved the roasted carrots and fried Brussels sprouts. We walked downtown just a little bit before heading back to our hotel, exhausted. It was probably only about 7 pm, so I got a beer from the bar and drank it while Ellie and I watched Ferris Bueller’s Day Off in our room. When we’d passed what I think is the Chicago suburb where John Hughes’ movies take place, Ellie asked who John Hughes was, which made me sad and led to some education-by-movie. I’m not sure she loved it, but she’s not an eighties kid.
Since I had gone to sleep early I woke up early, about 5:30 am. I showered and woke Ellie at 6:30. She quickly reminded me she had asked me to wake her at seven, so she went back to sleep for another half hour while I read. We got ready, packed, and had a quick breakfast at our hotel. We checked out and drove just a few minutes to Marquette on the other side of town.
Marquette’s open house was basically the opposite of Loyola’s admissions tour, organization-wise. There were students standing right outside the garage to direct us, and others about halfway to our destination to make sure we didn’t get lost on the two-block walk. We checked in, then went to sign up for a tour before the welcome address. Ellie and I liked our tour guide, Danika, who was a nursing student. Ellie’s already applied to Marquette’s nursing school, so that was our focus and it was nice to have randomly ended up with a guide who was a nursing student. She took us inside a (really nice) dorm room and a classroom, and when the tour finished she gave each of the students a business card in case they had questions later.
We entered a large theater with several hundred other prospective students and parents and listened to a 45-minute welcome speech. It was basically a why-I-love-Marquette presentation by the dean and assistant dean of admissions. From there we walked to the nursing building and listened to another 45-minute presentation, followed by a chance to walk through the simulation lab. We went back to the union to talk to an admissions counselor and shop in the bookstore. We grabbed ramen at a restaurant basically on the way to the parking garage and then began the 4 1/2 hour drive home.
On the way to Milwaukee from Chicago we’d driven under an oasis rest stop, and Ellie wanted to visit there on the way south. I didn’t have enough gas to get us home anyway, so we fueled up, then used the restroom and grabbed Auntie Ann’s pretzel bites for the car. That was intended to be our last stop, but as we approached U.S. 30 in Indiana, we decided to get off and shop at the Albanese Candy Company store. We bought way too much candy and got back on the road. There were only about three slowdowns the entire trip, and even with losing an hour we were home by seven. It was a nice trip, but between the low sleep and all the driving, I was really exhausted that evening!