We woke up at the campsite-after I got about 4 hours of sleep. I love camping :-|. The next stop on the trip was the great Notre Dame! I’ve gotta be honest, I was expecting something a little bit more spectular from the Notre Dame campus. Maybe it was just the dry season, but it just looked kinda blah. We did about a 30-45 min jog around the campus grounds, running through the basketball arena, around the football stadium, through the chapels, around part of the lake, by the Grotto, and back to the car.
And we move on to Chicago! Driving into Chicago we hit traffic, and it was hot out! While we were sitting in traffic a little kid walked by our car and said “wow! there’s a lot of stuff in that car”! On a side note, the last time my brother (Brian Bauer) was in Chicago (doing a cross country triathlon for http://ilovebaseball.org) he had his van broken into twice in one night! Because of this we were a little worried about waking up in the morning and finding all of my belongings gone. After find the apartment of the friends that were letting us crash in their living room, we went for a swim at a local pool. This was my first swim of the trip, and was very important for me because I’d never swam freestyle before and I had my first triathlon the day after we arrived back in Seattle. The first time was horrible, but I’m lucky that my brother is a good swim coach. After the swim we ate some food and ran to Wrigley Field to experience the energy of the legendary stadium. The Cubs had just finished a game and the street were still loaded with crazy fans!
After the run through baseball history we headed toward Lake Michigan for the 2nd half of our run. Lake Michigan is HUGE, and swarming with active people. This experience made me want to come back to Chicago. It’s like New York City but with water that you can actually cool off in!
One of the things that is important to me when visiting new cities is eating at places that the locals love. On this particular night I was craving pizza, and after all of the calories that we already burned that day it was probably a good thing! We went to a pizza place called Piece. The pizza was great, and apparently they have great beer as well (I’m not a beer drinker so I couldn’t tell you…). The story behind this picture is that our group of 5 people probably would have been fine with one large pizza but we got two! And it turns out that Brian and I were the only big eaters at the table (1 other guy, and 2 girls), so we were challenged to finish the pizza’s… and we did! 🙂
After that feast we went back to the apartment, moved the car into a secure parking place, and passed out for about 9 hours! Stay tuned for day 4 in Chicago and Omaha!
