Day Five: The Shedd Aquarium, Pot Belly, Union Station

Ah, the last day in Chicago!

We began with breakfast in the room (cheese, bread, fruit, and coffee). Then we checked out of the hotel and stashed our luggage and hopped on the bus to go to the Shedd Aquarium. Our CityPASS ticket allowed us to skip the general admission line (as it had at all the museums we visited with the exception of the Museum of Contemporary Art, which was not associated with CityPASS). This was a good thing as the line to get in via general admission was daunting.

The Shedd was one of the places recommended by nearly everyone I talked to about our trip. I can see it. I mean, yes, the place is really beautiful and houses an amazing array of animals. But at the end of the day,  I feel generally about aquariums as I do about zoos. I know that the chance to see these animals in the wild would ordinarily be few and far between (well, with some exceptions, as I have been whale watching on two continents and have gone diving with reef sharks and sea turtles and jellyfish and octopuses and and and...), but I can't help feeling that putting animals in tanks and cages for the purpose of entertainment (or even education) is nearly impossible to justify.

I mean, I love whales, like this cutie Beluga whale.

But please let's agree not to do this to whales anymore.

Let's just all calm down, have a caffeine break and then look at some coral, okay?

So pretty.

Look at those colors!

This curious little pufferfish held still while I took half a dozen photos. I love pufferfish. (Do you know that the Shedd Aquarium employes a dentist to help care for the pufferfish's teeth? They do!) Pufferfish have such engaging personalities. (Anthropomorphize much? Yes. Yes, I do.)

Although fish are very curious creatures in general. They do like to see what's going on in their environments, just like you and I do.

For example, let's say that after you leave the aquarium, you go for a couple of quick sandwiches before hopping on the train. While are eating your sandwiches in the Pot Belly sandwich shop across from the hotel, this comes down the street.  Wouldn't you be curious about what was going on?

Fish are the same way! (This guy, by the way, was advertising some football thing for the nearby television station.)

Anyway, after lunch, we picked up our luggage and taxied over to Union Station, found our gate, and waited for our train with a lot of different kinds of folks waiting for their trains, too.

A lot of Amish people were boarding in Chicago. David overheard a conversation in which one of them said they were heading to Stockton, CA. Why though? No clue. I kept wanting to be seated with some Amish in the dining car, but instead, on the way home, we were seated with some painfully nice people from Wisconsin and some blandly racist woman from Las Vegas.

And then there was nothing but 26 hours on the train until we hit home. (Well, 28 1/2 hours actually, as we were stopped outside Dodge City for an hour and a half or more waiting for our engineers to meet the train. It's a convoluted story, but the essence is that the day before we left Chicago, the east-bound train on the same line struck a semi-truck outside of Albuquerque. The engineers involved in the accident were sent to the hospital and then had an imposed period of rest before they could resume their duties. We were waiting for them to meet up with our train and bring us back to Albuquerque.)