Chicago - Wednesday

Wednesday, Kimmy had gotten lucky and called in to get tickets to the Oprah show taping, so we woke up early and took a cab over there, waited for a while, and then got in to watch Oprah talk to Valerie Bertinelli, Marie Osmond, and Star Jones about celebrity weight loss. The topic was boring, but it was still interesting to get to see the taping of a TV show in that way. The show we saw is supposed to air on April 1.

Harpo studios isn't far from Greektown, and we like gyros, so we walked a few blocks and found a place that seemed pretty busy, so we stopped in. We each ordered a gyros plate, and it was a ton of food. The plate came with one pita, but there was enough meat for 3 of them probably. So we did our best with that for lunch and agreed that we like Niko Niko's in Houston better. I thought the meat was a little too greasy at this place.

We were still pretty exhausted, and Kimmy's ankle was hurting from all the walking I made her do the first 2 days, so we went back tot he hotel to nap, then in the afternoon checked out the museums near Soldier Field, where I grabbed another hot dog from a stand. I liked the one at Gold Coast Dogs better, and we decided that the neon relish is very important to a good chicago style dog, however wrong it may seem visually, but the pickle on this hot dog was really good (I'm very much a pickle fan).

After that, we rode a bus over to Navy Pier and got some nice views of the skyline there. We still had one more Chicago food to try, the Italian Beef Sandwich, and we wanted to get one at the famous Mr. Beef, which was a few blocks from our hotel. We made our way back over there, and they shut the lights off as we were walking there, about a block away. So disappointing. So we decided to walk back to the hotel and hopefully find some place to stop in on the way. There was actually another famous Italian Beef place on the way back, but it looked empty from a distance, and we didn't want to chance it being closed too, and we were really starving at this point, so we popped into this place that looked like a interesting called Ed Debevic's. We usually research where we eat pretty thoroughly before going there, thanks to Kimmy's google skills, but we didn't know what to expect at this place. Ed's was pretty kitschy, styled like a 50s/60s diner, they give you paper hats, and the waitstaff is pretty into the whole thing. They'll sit at your table to take your order, make little jokes about popping your food into the microwave or checking back on you in a couple hours, and even hop up on the diner counter and start doing choreographed dances (I'm not sure how well the ghostbusters theme and "shake your booty" fit into the 50s/60s feel, but they made it work I guess).

Anyway, the food was pretty good there, Kimmy got a Route 66 burger with bacon and guacamole, and I ordered a salad and Chili 6-way - chili with macaroni, beans, cheese, onions, and sour cream. It wasn't a Texas sized bowl, and it certainly wasn't Texas chili, but of course that's not what I was expecting, and together with the salad and an oreo shake, it hit the spot pretty nicely that evening.