Miles graduated from 8th grade today. As readers may remember from Liam’s experience, there is a ceremony to commemorate this in Chicago, with caps and gowns and pomp and circumstance. To back up a bit, as John just said “(we) Americans have graduation ceremonies for everything, even dog training.” Having said that, why not? Preschool graduations were just about the cutest thing either of us have ever seen. And today’s ceremony was very nice too, with a few short speeches and each student walking across the stage to get a diploma and shake hands with their main group of teachers.…

Yesterday was the annual fundraiser for the Active Transportation Alliance, where they shut down the entirety of Lake Shore Drive all the way from the Museum of Science and Industry in Hyde park, all the way north to the end of Lake Shore Drive on the northside, from 5:30am to 11am. For the first time ever we were able to complete the entire thing, 30 miles in total! The weather was a little overcast and at times drizzly but it was still fun to see the city from an angle usually reserved for folks whizzing by in cars!

Finally, the day we’ve been ready to celebrate, Nana’s birthday!  We started off the day with a look around the Power and Light district in Kansas City. The area is being fixed up quite a bit as you can tell from the addition of a pub called The Dubliner!   We walked over to the new Kaufmann Center for Performing Arts, a fabulous new performance theater that looks a lot like the Sydney Opera House. Nana had been on a tour of the Kaufmann Center and said that the architect was influenced by the opera house, so it wasn’t just…

After a competitive thumb wrestling match, Miles won.

We had a great trip to Kansas City this weekend! There were some storms but no tornadoes. This shelter sign in the airport tells you where to go if there is a tornado. You know you’re not in Kansas (or Missouri) anymore when you get used to a lack of tornado shelter signs! We arrived late-ish on Friday night and went straight to our hotel. On Saturday morning, after a nice breakfast that included a chia parfait (will have to replicate that at home to explain further!) we went out to Grandview to visit with Nana and Grandpa for a…

This question has puzzled mathematicians for generations, +18 hours on a twelve hour clock is just too hard! Now with the new Apple watch, we will always know if it’s too late or early to skype with Rory and team, thanks apple!

John and I rode our bikes to Calumet Fisheries today. It’s located at 95th street and near the lakeshore, within sight of the Chicago Skyway bridge that you take to drive from Chicago to Indiana. It was pretty cool and overcast, with either some light rain or heavy mist settling in toward the end. But we were dressed warmly so it was a very pleasant ride. On the way south, there was a strong wind at our backs, so we decided that instead of cycling 15 miles into a headwind home we took the bus, which proved to be a…

Friday evening and Saturday we found even more things to do! First of all, we went to Maison, a really great venue with live music and no 21+ requirements. We saw an amazing jazz band and Miles had his first (that he will admit to anyway!) experience with a bouncer. At the door he was asked “hey, how old are you?” and Miles answered “13.” To which a lot of confusion ensued because while the place serves food and therefore is allowed to have all ages inside until 10pm, it was clear they didn’t have any real mechanisms in place for this…

On the way back to the city in the rental car, we visited a really excellent smokehouse, sorry I can’t remember the name at all. But we had their specialty, strawberry beignets, for dessert. Totally different shape from the square Cafe du Monde beignets, these were more the size and shape of hush puppies or donut holes. The strawberry glaze was amazing though! Nice to get a bit of in season strawberries while we could, since Michigan strawberries have several months to go before showing up in our farmer’s markets! We then went to visit the Lower 9th Ward neighborhood…

As sometimes happens, the vacation blog posts didn’t quite get finished all at once. So let’s go back to Louisiana to finish up our trip… On Friday, we rented a car and drove about an hour out of New Orleans to Wallace, Louisiana, where the Whitney Plantation is located. You can see more about it on the official website here: http://www.whitneyplantation.com/, and also the review that piqued our interest here: http://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/01/magazine/building-the-first-slave-museum-in-america.html?_r=0. All around this area, rich land with good access to shipping along the Mississippi River, are plantations that thrived pre-Civil War because of the labor of enslaved people. They are now…