Chicago Eating Tour 2012

German chocolate doughnut, where have you been all my life? Glazed & Infused is making dreams come true.

Me, getting absolutely no air.

"Time to make the doughnuts..."

Another fancy doughnut, this time with bacon. Courtesy of hip brunch spot Longman & Eagle.

I liked the cocktail illustrations at Scofflaw.

Shortly after eating the massive chocolate doughnut, we had lunch/dinner at Frank 'n Dawgs, where they serve a very dressed up hot dog. I went for a brat with portabella mushrooms, then we split the roasted cauliflowers and truffle fries. It was a meal for champions.

Big Shoulders

"Stormy, husky, brawling, City of the Big Shoulders..."

That's right, Chicago!

I love having friends where when I visit them, I don't have to plan anything. They have my holiday all sorted. Sure enough, I didn't plan a blessed thing, Lani seemingly knows everyone and is plugged in everywhere. So as soon as I got off the plane, we were off to see Gemini Club do an in-store performance at Dr. Martens.

They were really fun, dancing on the counter near the cash register. The lead singer claimed someone threw up but I don't think anyone was partying that hard at the Dr Martens store.

We then ate tacos at Big Star, the kind of honky tonk hipster taqueria where they play Loretta Lynn's "Fist City." I love Loretta Lynn and I love tacos so sign me up. Lani then took us for spicy chocolate ice cream at the futuristic iCream, where your ice cream is individually churned and made to order.

 I know this is probably meant to entertain children, but I oohhed and ahhed with great respect.

On day two, I did some work at the aforementioned "Big Shoulders" coffee shop, where I ordered a marshmallow latte. Hey, I'm on vacation and it was delicious. I'm just thinking about it now, but a design-y coffee shop selling marshmallow lattes doesn't readily correlate with Carl Sandburg's poem about butchers, tool makers, freight handlers and Chicago brawn.

Later that afternoon, I walked around Wicker Park and tried to shop but nothing caught my eye. Except murals and street art.

Everyone has a single speed because it's so flat here.

Lani has a single speed, and a moped, pictured here! So cool. She is on the fringes of a moped gang, for real. It's a group of guys who hang out and fix up their mopeds. I made her pose with the moped while wearing her cavewoman Halloween costume, assembled from faux fur pieces in her closet.

I forgot to ride the moped on the trip! Doh! I'm secretly terrified. We rode the bus instead, and I was very impressed with how easy it was to get around on public transit.

That evening, I crashed a going away party at Cafe Ba Ba Reeba, with a pre fixe menu. They chose well, and the tapas just kept arriving at the table.

So good. So filling. The fullness level reminded me of a tapas Thanksgiving.

Lani's friends were so nice to let me join in the fun! After dinner, we went to see Flight Facilities' DJ set at Primary. I loved it because I am absolutely obsessed with their song "Crave You" and it was so fun to hear a roomful of people singing along. It's a song you gotta sing to, don't you think? And they played a bunch of other songs I knew, only because I heard them before on Lani's mixes. She's so ahead of the game.

Sorry, shoddy iPhone picture, but you can get an idea of the cool LED wall behind the dj booth. "Wasn't it cute that Flight Facilities dressed up for Halloween, with the little aviator hats?" I told Lani. "Oh that's not a Halloween thing. They always wear that," she said. Ah, I see.

Che Guevara T-shirt

I'm back! Let's do this thing!

So I just returned on Tuesday from a visit to Chicago to see my lovely and amazing friend Lani. More on her and Chicago in future posts. But first I know you are dying to hear my thoughts on topical matters. Namely, Sandy and Halloween. For Halloween this year, I dressed as Andrew WK again. And for the second year, not a single person knew who I was, or had any reaction whatsoever. I need to face facts. The Andrew WK costume is just not going to happen.

In fact, the bouncer at the club — a fancy Chicago speakeasy called Untitled — almost didn't let me in. "Is this some sort of costume?" he said, looking at my white jeans and Brooks running shoes.  Yes, yes, it is. Just because I'm not dressed as a slutty cat, no one can identify that I am in costume?

Thankfully, he eventually let me in, and I got in at Paris Club too, meaning that I visited two clubby, bottle-service establishments wearing running shoes. Holla. I may never go back to stilettos, now that the precedent has been set.

Anyway, when I wasn't wearing ridiculously unsexy Halloween costumes, I was on the phone, attempting to reschedule my flight on Monday back to D.C. because I figured it would be canceled due to the hurricane. On Saturday night, Lani went out to DJ and I stayed home for a bit to deal with Delta. Four hours later, Delta finally called me back and I was on the phone with a guy in India when there was a knock at Lani's door.

It's always a little unsettling when you are alone, not anticipating any visitors and you hear a knock, but I decided to open the door. And here is what I saw:

Photo courtesy of Lani!

Lani's neighbor Benny, dressed exactly like this. He wasn't expecting to see me, and I surely wasn't expecting to see him. I was still on the phone with Delta and I tried to close the door but Benny needed help pulling the t-shirt over the cardboard rigging to complete his Che Guevara t-shirt look, so I attempted to yank the t-shirt down in the back while negotiating flight times on the phone, all the while without even explaining who I was to Benny.

Lani said he won $400 in a costume contest for this. Well deserved, no?

Travels with Gosh Gee Golly!

I'm so excited to be featured as a guest blogger for Smarter Travel!  I wrote about how I used the Vélib' system during my trip to Paris this spring, and you can check out the post here!  Thank you so much to my good friend and travel editor extraordinaire, Caroline, for the opportunity.  This girl travels more than anyone, she just got back from an incredible trip to Australia!

If you are visiting from the Smarter Travel site, here are some of my travel adventures.  I promise you that each action-packed link will contain travel tips learned the hard way, some pretty pictures, some misadventures, and let's be real, some photos of stuffed animal souvenirs.  So here are some of the amazing places I've visited in the past few years:

• Iceland — we petted wild ponies and went dogsledding! 
• France — where I visited the French Open and got my lost camera back in a boozy twist of fate
• Peru — check out my hostel accommodations, just missing part of the hotel room door
• San Francisco — including our terrifying GoCar ride
• NYC
• Los Angeles

I hope you take a minute to peruse, find your next vacation stop, or leave me a comment with your favorite travel memories!  Thanks so much for checking out my blog!

France INSTAX

So happy I dragged my Fujifilm INSTAX camera to France on our vacation.  Sure, you look like an uber tourist when you pull out this gigantic honkin' camera, but the little print-out photos are so much fun.  I love the fact that it airbrushes all your blemishes away, ha. Don't we look retro? It's like real life Instagram.

I finally learned how to hook up my new wireless printer/scanner, so I can share these photos now.  I had to chat with a Comcast representative to figure out how to change my wireless password, and it took a few representatives for me to figure it out.  My first reaction to tech conversations is always utter despondency.  "This will never, ever work," I told Joe, instantly abandoning all hope as I chatted online with someone named John Anthony from Comcast.  And I mean furiously chatted, typing a full paragraph of frustration about exactly why I was unable to change my password.

"You don't need to type all of that," Joe said.  But I wanted John Anthony to thoroughly understand where I was coming from.  "Why don't you just write, 'Yes," Joe said.

John Anthony suggested something I had already I tried.  "I knew that already," I wrote.  Throwing some shade.  I could've written "DUH" or "DOY" but I refrained.

Upstate New York Lakehouse

I submit that there's nothing that can make you feel like more of a jerk than forgetting your mother's birthday. I actually forgot it twice too. I realized I forgot a day after the fact, but then once again forgot when I saw her in real life and prattled on until she brought it up. I remembered Julia Child's birthday for goodness sake's, and she's long dead, but forgot my own mother's birthday.

Apparently, the only one who remembered was Rain the dog, and my brother. That came out of left field. Go Danny. My dad forgot too.  At the end of the day, he reached into the cabinet to get the dog a treat, and my mom said, "Do you know what day this is?" Dad froze, hand outstretched into the Pup-Peroni container. The gears in his brain turned. He knew he had done something wrong, but what?

So we all screwed up except Dan. Hopefully a family togetherness trip to our lake cabin in upstate New York made up for it.  Joe drove six hours to visit too, that was so sweet of him.

This is one of my favorite places in the world.  It's very modest, but so peaceful.  There's nothing to do here except watch my cousin's children and the next door neighbor girls play with our puppy.

I read a few books, watched a documentary about Finnish sauna culture (few channels here), and went swimming too. I'm brave about lake swimming, but there was a humongous spider on the dock, and of course, she lived right on the ladder to get into the water. I chose to jump off the possibly broken diving board instead. Warning, crazy big dock spider pictured below, I'll hide it behind the jump for sensitive souls.