Black and yellow

For James' 25th birthday celebration I decided to take him to Chicago. It was his first trip to a real big city and I wanted it to be with me. You'll probably hear quite a bit about this trip, since it was such an amazing time, but for now we'll start out with something small.

I had been to Chicago many times. Not enough to give directions, but well enough to find my way around, if that makes sense. For this trip I booked everything in advance. It was great. We stayed at the Hotel Monaco (more on that later), had so much scheduled, and I even managed to book one of the only river tours on the day that the river is dyed green for St. Patrick's day. Yea, I know it, I am an amazing girlfriend. I tell myself that all the time.

At the Hotel Monaco.

Since we stayed so close to everything downtown we planned to take the El everywhere we went. For those of you not familiar - the El is the Elevated Subway system that takes you everywhere within the city. It was James' first subway ride! Wee!

We walked and walked and toured and sight-saw everything. We wandered around and around and had deep dish pizza and caramel popcorn, and wandered some more. At one point it started raining and damn was it cold. We were relatively close to our hotel room, but I was not about to sprint the entire way back in the freezing rain. That's not my style. From my previous trips, I knew how to hail a cab (and I watch TV, I mean.. come on) so that was that. In Louisville there are plenty of taxis, but in order to catch a ride you have to call in advance. Boo. I was ready to go now. We had a dinner to get ready for.

So I stepped one foot off the pavement, into the street, and flung up one hand. James watched from the sidewalk. Immediately a cab screeched over to where we stood and I climbed right in. I wish everything worked like that (*flings up arm and yells "Turkey sammie!"*). James, still standing on the sidewalk, looked on and eventually got in the cab, too.

He sat there in silence for most of the way there, a silly grin on his face, when I realized, he had never actually seen someone hail a taxi.