Well, today’s been an interesting day. We drove down to the dealership and started looking at cars again. Unfortunately some of the ones we’d read about on the dealer’s website were either already sold or at one of their other locations. Our salesrep[ref]Hey, Tyler![/ref] worked with us for about 5 hours to help us find a car we both liked and could afford. After all that work, we ended up with the 2013 Nissan Rogue you see here. It’s newer than our Tucson was, has a smoother ride and even more head room. While it doesn’t have all the advanced features of the Tucson; it was a bit less expensive. This allowed us to include the cost of adding a backup camera[ref]They’ll actually be replacing the Rogue’s entertainment console to swap it out with one that has a screen for the backup camera.[/ref]
I’d also like to take a moment to thank the staff at Edmunds.com specifically: Stephanie, Justin and Philip. The Rogue wasn’t a car I was familiar with until after speaking with you; but having driven it now, I’m really digging it. 🙂
Most weeks, I take maybe a dozen or so images and choose the one I like best to post as my weekly photo. Today’s post will be quite a bit longer, as Michelle & I just got back from a short vacation to Chicago and I’ve got rather more pictures to share than usual.
We drove out Thursday morning, hitting Chicago around 3. We were hoping to get there before the traffic went completely nuts for rush hour, while still not having to wait around too long before we could check into our hotel. We managed the second part without any problem, but the first was a bit more …. problematic. I’m not sure if it was actual rush hour traffic or not. But when we got within a couple of miles of the hotel the traffic turned into a snarled mess of bumper-to-bumper nonsense of the sort we don’t generally have to deal with at home.
A vacation is having nothing to do and all day to do it in.
Robert Orben
Scale model of our hotel at MSI
We made it safely through that mess to the hotel, handed the car over the the valet service, checked in, went to our room and collapsed for a bit. Oddly I find driving to Chicago to be a much bigger nightmare vastly more stressful and tiring than driving to Minneapolis. *shrug* Eventually we got back up and headed out to dinner. We decided for our first night to just hit the hotel’s restaurant.
I know it wasn’t particularly adventurous of us, but it had gotten some decent reviews and the menu promised both Italian food & pizza. We ended up having an excellent dinner[ref]Spinach supreme pizza with fresh mushrooms as well as a new (to me) and most excellent hard cider (Wyder’s Dry Apple)[/ref] and were served by an outstanding waiter.
The next morning we headed out to the Museum of Science and Industry. We got there early, bought our tickets and then waited a in line for a few minutes. Shortly afterwards, they opened up and we headed up into the museum. We went straight over to the area holding the MythBusters: The Explosive Exhibition. This was actually one bonus to not getting around to visiting MSI the last time we vacationed in Chicago. The MythBusters exhibit is a temporary exhibit that only arrived at MSI earlier this year and leaves for its next stop in a couple of weeks. So if we’d come when I’d first wanted to, I probably wouldn’t have gotten to see this exhibit. (more…)
