4th of July

This year for the 4th of July, my parents came to visit for the day. It was a truncated visit since they had to make it back to MI for a wedding on Saturday, but we stuffed as much into their time here as possible.
We got up early (kinda) Friday morning and headed to Naperville to catch the Metra into Chicago. Once we were in the city we headed directly to the Taste of Chicago in Grant Park to experience the food and crowds and craziness that is “The Taste”. It was a total blast! It took some discussion and observation to figure out buying the tickets (which are used in place of cash at all the booths) and then there was more discussion about which booth to hit up for Chicago Style pizza. Pizza in hand, we then walked around a bit looking for a good place to sit and finally found a bench right across from the Buckingham Fountain with an excellent view of the lake.









More eating, more walking, taking a picture of our reflection in "the bean" and a slight delay at Union Station and we headed back to Romeoville.

After a short siesta to rest a little and brush our teeth, we headed down into Joliet to attend a Joliet Jackhammer’s baseball game. It’s the minor league team in the area and our seats were pretty close (7th or 8th row up, behind the home team dugout). It was pretty normal baseball fare except that they kept hitting foul balls that went out into the crowd or above our heads out of the stadium. I don’t go to many baseball games (or watch many games on TV for that matter), but I thought it was unusual. The most exciting bit during the game was the “foul ball of death” that almost killed us. We were so used to the balls going out into the stands and the street that I kind of stopped watching where they went. One ball went up over our heads and I lost sight of it and assumed it had gone out of the stadium until it landed on the seat right in front of my mom and bounced off the seat next to her and calmly rolled away. It caused quite the ruckus. Everyone around us was talking about how if the people who were sitting there had been in their seats (which they had been except both sets of people got up to get food so they weren’t their when the ball came down) they would have gotten hurt, etc., etc. Needless to say I was very vigilant of all the foul balls for the rest of the game.
After the excitement of the game (The Jackhammers came back from 5 to 1 to tie it in the 8th inning and win it in the 9th) there were fireworks set to really peppy and exciting classical music (you know the type I mean). It was a great show and there were appropriate oohing and aahing noises all around.

On Saturday morning we got up and went to play a round of miniature golf. I found a place online that is relatively new (I think) and right next to a small airfield so we were playing on a well cared for course and watching small two-seater plans take-off and land. It was all very exciting. The weather was perfect for being outdoors. The best part of the morning was when my dad got a call from a salesperson on his cell phone and said “I’m actually on the golf course right now so I can’t talk”. Ha.
It was the most fun I’ve had on the 4th of July in a long time. The only thing missing was my bro, but he was off having fun in WI.