Our next week-long stop was in Chicago to visit a couple friends.

The first folks we saw were Daniel’s childhood friend Ryan and his wife Marissa. They’ve got a beautiful house 30 minutes from downtown Chicago. Unfortunately for Winnie, they’ve also got 3 cats, so Winnie wasn’t allowed inside. Instead she sat just outside on their porch where we could see her through a glass door:

Winnie protested this situation quite loudly and quite often, so Daniel frequently went to check on her. In so doing, he made a perfectly reasonable and understandable mistake that could happen to anybody: he walked into the glass door. Twice. Ryan had to put a post-it note on the door to prevent it from happening again.

Anyway.

We had deep dish pizza from Ryan and Marissa’s favorite spot, made s’mores on their back porch, and then played some games in their basement.

We saw Ryan and Marissa once more later that week for dinner at a ramen place and dessert at a nearby ice cream shop called Jeni’s. Ellie insisted that we go to Jeni’s because “it’s a famous ice cream shop that started in Chicago!“. But when we later learned that this shop actually started in Ohio, Ellie didn’t seem any less interested in visiting, which makes one wonder if her real motivations had simply to been to eat ice cream no matter the provenance 🤔

We also saw Ellie’s friend Brittany while we were there. Brittany, Winnie, and Ellie all used to work together at Lyft, and though it had been many years Winnie hadn’t forgotten her old desk buddy:

• How much we’d like to visit again: 7/10. We’d absolutely visit again to see our friends here.
• How much we’d like to live here: 4/10. We really don’t want to live in a large city, but it’d be nice to be near our friends that live here.