Navy Pier

Sunday morning Travalon and I drove to a Ukrainian neighborhood in Chicago to go to Sunday Liturgy. We met Cecil Markovitch there; he had left Madtown at six in the morning! The entire liturgy was sung in Ukrainian, and it was very beautiful but I didn’t understand a word of it. There is another Ukrainian Catholic church just down the road, and that is the original one, but some people felt it was becoming too Latin, so they founded this church to be purely Ukrainian.

Then we went to downtown Chicago to walk barefoot through the fountain at Millennial Park and to see St. Peters on the Loop, a church flush against the other buildings around it so you don’t really see it until you are across from it. We had Chicago deep dish pizza for lunch, then Cecil went off to a jazz record store while Travalon and I took the water taxi to Navy Pier. In all my travels to Chicago, I had never been there. It was very crowded because of the holiday weekend and the beautiful weather. We thought about riding the iconic Ferris wheel, but the line to buy tickets was really long, so we just walked the length of the pier instead. We listened to a live salsa band and stopped into the Billy Goat Tavern made famous on Saturday Night Live, the origin of the Curse of the Billy Goat. (Which did not seem to be afflicting the Cubs that day either, because they beat the Phillies quite handily.) We took the water taxi downtown and admired the Chicago architecture, then we headed home, with a quick stop in Pewaukee to see Travalon’s mother and grab a bite to eat. (We weren’t very hungry after that pizza!) Chicago was so much fun, and it really isn’t far away. We are going to try to get there more often. My one regret was not trying a beer from Five Rabbits Brewery that we saw on the menu Saturday night. How could I resist something with a name like that? But the waitress recommended something else, which was fine but nothing too special.

Famous Hat