Thursday Lauren was in town. Our first order of business was to eat. That took an hour (to pick a place). We started walking south and kept passing places that didn’t call our names. We saw “The Blue Peacock” from across the street and wandered in intrigued. Turns out it was Eritrean which is similar to Ethiopian. We had rejected several Ethiopian places along the way because Lauren doesn’t care for it and Nathan wasn’t feeling adventurous. Turns out it was FANTASTIC! We were so happy we accidentally ended up there.
After lunch, we rode mass transit to Navy Pier (I love mass transit!) The ferris wheel was more than we were willing to pay, so we played putt-putt instead. Nathan is famously bad at putt-putt, but I beat him in terribleness! We’re a perfect pair. 🙂 Then we had to rush up to Skokie to pick up Beth for the rehearsal dinner. Traffic was terrible (don’t get on the highway!), then we couldn’t find a place to park. Well, we found a place, but it was really expensive (more than the one we had almost parked in) and the “valet” was really sketchy. Plus they had a clothes dryer in the garage and that just seemed odd. So we headed back to the other sketchy place that was $5 cheaper and unattended.
The rehearsal dinner was fun. Grey & Eric were having a great time. Lauren got her first taste of ice cream cake (at least she made it before she hit 30!) After the party, we decided to stop at a restaurant to use their facilities and grab another drink and snack before heading north for bed. They had a super loud dj and pretty fun decor. We each got a little something and then chatted for a while. When we were ready to go, we couldn’t get our server to look at us. They were closing up the back tables, so we thought they would kick us out. But nope. She thought we were happy where we were. When we finally got to the car and tried to leave the garage, it rejected our ticket. You can’t stand on the other side of the gate arm (which is one lane entrance/exit and seems rather unsafe) because it registered that you did not have a car with you. Luckily there was a little piece of paper taped under the card reader thing with a phone number on it. We called and the lady on the other end worked some magic to let us out. FREE PARKING!! It was a good story. 🙂
