A Crazy Good Weekend

 

Hey friends, I've been busier/crazier than normal so I've got to drop the weekly posts for a bit.  For the next few weeks I'll just be popping in randomly to talk about this n'that.  Case in point: this post.  Lemme tell you about last weekend.  I went places!  It's a Tale of Two Great Lakes, Family Mayhem, and some FLW on the side.

How This Trip Came to Be

Chicago is getting to be where it's at for the family.  Last weekend my Chicago niece had her bridal shower AND another niece (from SIL#1's tribe) moved there!  The boys were on vacation with their mom, so the hubs stayed home with the dog while I went to represent.

I knew there would be some hanging out with family in addition to the shower, but what else could I get into while I was there?  You guessed it - I was on the Frank Lloyd Wright public sites list in a flash and found three tours that fit into my schedule for the weekend.

But wait there's more!  In the twist that no one saw coming, it turned out that the day before the shower was one of two days in 2023 when the Put In Bay Lighthouse was open for tours.  Well, well, well, it just so happens that Put in Bay is on the way to CHI.  What are the odds?

My next move was figuring out where to stay.  Most of the FLW sites were in Oak Park, the shower was north of downtown, and the incoming niece was moving right into the heart of downtown.  In the end I decided to stay downtown near the niece's place because her whole family came up for the move so that put me closest to the majority of the fam.  I got myself the cheapest, smallest, closest hotel room that I could find.  It was very nice, or at least I think it was from the brief time that I was there.  I checked in Friday evening and was out before 8AM on Sunday.  My time in the hotel room was as follows: time spent sleeping, about half an hour before bed each night, about an hour each morning, and a brief stop in the middle of Saturday between FLW tours and the shower.

As far as driving, I can handle driving into and out of Chicago like a champ.  Driving around Chicago and dealing with parking...not so much.  That's why God invented Uber.  Yeah yeah I coulda taken a train anywhere I wanted to go for a few bucks and yeah yeah I did not.  Ubers have gone up in price a lot since our pre-COVID trips and it was still absolutely worth it.

Friday

I arrived at the Put In Bay ferry mid morning and was soon back on my beloved island.  The lighthouse is very close to the south dock, so it was an easy walk.

As far as lighthouses go, this one is an easy climb.

 

There also frankly isn't much to see but c'mon it's a lighthouse so it was all that it needed to be.

I was done with the lighthouse in about 10 minutes.  My Put in Bay philosophy is that there is never enough time to Do All The Things, but doing two things per visit feels about right.  From my list of things that I still wanted to do, I picked the Tour Train.  It's not actually a train, it's a jeep with a trailer that rides around the island with a narrated tour.  10/10 recommend.  It starts on the north of the island, so I added in the new experience of taking the Put in Bay bus @ $3 a ride.  You're just not going to go broke doing this stuff.

Anyhoo, it was mid afternoon and time to leave the island behind.  I departed from Lake Erie and about four hours later I found myself in sight of Lake Michigan.  A short while later I was downtown and met up with the fam for dinner.  We stayed up late and had a blast.

Saturday Morning With Frank

I was up bright and early on Saturday morning to go hang out with Frank. I arrived an hour before the first tour because I wanted to walk around.  Oak Park is home to a billion FLW houses, so I wanted to see the 'hood.

Unfortunately I didn't quite manage the planning that I needed to do to pull off a self-created walking tour of Oak Park.  It took a while to get my bearings so I didn't have time to walk past very many of the houses.  It's a neat place to roam around though, so I've got no complaints.

After wandering around for a while, it was time for church!

Unity Temple was my first time visiting a non-residential FLW building.  It's still very much in business as a church, and they also do tours on Saturdays.  The outside is very imposing, but there's a reason.  When the church was built in 1905, the street was busy, noisy, and oh yes, unpaved, so the big cement wall created a barrier to turn down the noise and keep out the dirt.

From the outside it looks like a giant cement block, but once you're inside, you get the FLW magic - he's packed in a bunch of windows so there's a ton of light.  Look, I'm not religious but this was a special space.

After Unity Temple, it was time to tour a house, but not just any house.  It was the crib of none other than FLW himself.

Ol' Frankie built The Frank Lloyd Wright Home and Studio in 1889 when he was a 22 year old newlywed, and lived there until 1909, when the marriage ended (a.k.a. the juicy stuff in the novel Loving Frank).

His studio was originally on the second floor right in the big triangle with all of the windows...but oops he had six kids so he had to build a few extensions over the years as the family expanded.  He may not have planned for a large family, but he made up for it by planning for electricity.  Even though it wasn't available in Oak Park at the time of construction, he still wired up the house so he was ready when it came.

His original studio ended up becoming the kids' room.  The partition runs the full length of the room so there are separate doors for each side.  Boys slept on one side, girls on the other, and the partition allowed them to talk and to throw things at each other during the night.

Does your kids playroom look like this?

The other side of the room was for music and performing.  They didn't want a big honking grand piano taking up valuable floor space so they simply built it in to the wall.

With the guts of the piano sticking out on the back staircase...ya gotta work with the space that you have.

Saturday Shenanigans

After the tours I hopped in an Uber and went back downtown to kick off the insanity of the day.  I had a grand total of 15 minutes to get ready for the shower and to meet up with SIL#1's tribe.  We grabbed an Uber XL and headed north to the shower.

I could write a book about the shower itself, but the edited version for the blog is that it was priceless.  We had a ton of family plus the incoming groom's family.

Hey anyone who saw season 2 of White Lotus, remember the orange cocktail that everyone was drinking?  No? Ok, here's what it looks like, it's called an Aperol Spritz.  It turns out that Aperols are the "it" drink with the cool girls (aka my adult nieces), so naturally I tried one.

This is the second time that I've ordered a drink from a TV show.  You can say what you want about Sex and the City, but I love a good Cosmo.  White Lotus and Aperols...loved the show, I didn't finish the drink. 'Nuff said.

After the shower we took on the next Big City activity, which was touring everyone's apartments now that our family has three in the city: home of SIL#2, the Bride Niece, and the Incoming Niece.  We settled in for dinner at SIL#2s and I cannot even tell you how late we were up.

Sunday With Frank

Sunday morning had me up and at 'em.  Strangely enough for all of my time in Chicago, I had never been to the Bean, so I took care of that and walked around the park.  When I was ready I ubered over to Hyde Park for my final FLW hit of the trip.  Ladies and Gentlemen, The Robie House.

 

After my visit with Frank, I went back downtown.  My belly said it was lunchtime so where should I go...oh hey hot dog cart in the park!  Gotta have the Chicago Dawg.

And with that, I hopped in the car and headed home.

Chicago FLW Rankings

If you have time to do only one FLW site, my money is absolutely positively on his house.  They have tours all day every day, so it's an easy one to fit into the schedule.  I'm telling you right now that when we're back in CHI for the wedding, I will be taking my fam here.

My 2nd fav was the Robie House.  I don't have much to say about it besides that it was amazing.

3rd place goes to Unity Temple.  Yes it's massively impressive and it's so close to the FLW house that if you're going there you might as well do Unity while you're there.  What's missing is the people part - a tour of a FLW house is 50% the architecture and the art and 50% the story of the people who lived there, and since this was never anyone's home, there isn't a fascinating "people" component of the story. 

What's Next

Another crazy good weekend is on tap!  Tomorrow is the kickoff for Mega Family Vacay 2023.  Four out of the five siblings in my husband's family plus all of the kids and S.O.'s for the adult kids.  It's gonna be a whole mess of people.  

The next time we talk, it will be from the beach.

Eventually life will settle down and I'll get back to our normal business of talking about food, workouts, TV, and books.  Until then, I'll be in and out with some crazy tales here and there.  Happy summer everyone!