Wednesday 28 May 2025
Slept in after a late finish at the Weller’s last night, and went for a walk around the nearby streets after that.
We are staying in Auroura, a suburb I’ve not stayed in before. There are plenty of Mexican food options here, there’s a supermarket just around the corner, the Illinois Prairie Path isn’t far…and whilst the house is a little weird in what it does and doesn’t have – no dish cloth, for example, and not much toilet paper! – it’s comfortable, especially the beds, which is the main thing.
Got my hair cut at Danada, then went downtown – the beginning of what was a pretty long trip to get to Wrigley Field for the Cubs game, against the historically-bad Colorado Rockies. We parked at Millennium Park (near the iconic Cloudgate sculpture, which is better known as The Bean) and walked over to a subway station on State Street, getting the red line train north that makes a few downtown stops underground, then emerges aboveground on the other side of downtown.
Like pretty much everyone else on the very crowded train, we got off at Addison, which is a very short walk from Wrigley Field, where the Cubs (and previous iterations of Chicago’s north side baseball team) have been playing since 1914.
Wrigley Field is nicknamed “The Friendly Confines” and is both a US National Historic Landmark and on the US Register of Historic Places. For those combined reasons, there has been very little change to the park since 1914, aside from a few video screens and replacement seats. The main scoreboard, like at the Adelaide Oval back home, is still hand-operated. I’m not a Cubs fan by any stretch of the imagination, but it’s a pretty cool place to see a game in.
Met my friend Sam – he was an IndyCar Radio Network producer for a few years, and now lives in Chicago – at Wrigley. We had seen each other briefly at Indy, but not to really talk, so it was fun to catch up and especially to trade observations of the race as well.
Onto the weather: to say it was a chilly night is probably not doing it justice. 14 degrees Celsius at first pitch and down to nearly 11 by the final out of the ninth inning. So much for this being late spring, and nearly summer.
The Cubs won 2-1 in a game that, mercifully considering the conditions, was completed in a little under two and a half hours, and, I must admit, probably isn’t going to be remembered all that fondly, except for the fact that the Cubs won. We managed to mostly thaw out on the walk back to the Addison train station.
The game ended at 9:30pm. We got on the train and were downtown by 10:30pm – no small feat, considering how many people flock to that station, and without additional ‘special event’ trains like we have in Sydney – and home in the suburbs about an hour after that. All in all, not too bad. It was nice to walk through downtown a little, when it was all lit up.
A fun, if cold night. Thankfully the weather on Thursday and Friday is going to be warmer.
kitchtrips 