Last day was spent shopping in outlet malls (and browsing around in an army store). Even the flight home was easy, as it was a late evening flight and flew quickly by sleeping. Outlets always become expensive, but at least I have two new pairs of pants and new shoes now. :)
The stupid stomach infection luckily passed, I was feeling almost OK in the morning and during the day even the rest disappeared.
So, today was a Chicago day. Just walking around the city, getting stuck in shops and seeing some of the sights. In the evening we visited Al Capone's old favourite bar, a small jazz club a bit outside the downtown. Not a bad place, still felt like it was 1920. Cash only, live jazz and speaking forbidden during the music.
Not much pictures from yesterdays. I won some kind of stomach infection and was suffering of fever and stomach problems all day, so did not really bother to take any. Of course on a day when we still had 400 kilometers to drive to reach Chicago.. Well, seems to be better on the morning, maybe not completely healthy but much better. I guess something was wrong in earlier foods.
We made it to Chicago in later afternoon and the cheapest and best option to stay was a small guesthouse in Boystown, the first officially recognized US LGBTQ+ village... Well, at least it's lively. And it's actually a beautiful and nice area near the downtown, which we hopefully will be exploring more today if my belly is better.
Today was a fun day. I wanted to fly somewhere in the US on this trip, so I had arranged with a company based at Buffalo Niagara Airport to come to fly with them. We took an hour long flight over the Niagara falls special flight area and around the Buffalo city with their instructor, and I even managed to not destroy the aircraft.
The weather was perfectly calm and sunny and even the falls actually looked better from the air than from ground level. Looking from ground level they are actually surprisingly small compared to many others we have seen, like the Icelandic ones or Brazilian Iguazu.
Aerial traffic is busy over the falls, so everyone is flying a predefined track and calling out their locations at specific waypoints on radio, which makes it at least a bit easier to not collide with other aircraft. Reminds me of the New York Hudson corridor flight path, which I flew with Mikko long time ago.
After the flight it was again driving time, total distance for today was like 650 kilometers. In the evening we reached Toledo on our way towards Chicago and stay there for a night. For the dinner we tried a Toronto specialty, Tony Packo's hot dog cafe which has been serving their famous "Hungarian" hotdogs for almost a hundred years.
Just for the map.
Ugh.. 18000 steps and I'm feeling a bit dead. The city is vibrant and nice, reminds me a lot of New York. Well, I guess that's not a wonder, as they are quite close to each other.
Walking, walking through an AI-assisted sightseeing route, biking a bit with city rental bikes and shopping in Uniqlo. Craft Beer Market was rather nice, 100 beers on tap.
Today's program was surprisingly.. More driving. In the morning we visited a Walmart shopping mall near yesterday's guest house just to explore, decided to skip the museums in Detroit and crossed the border to Canada over a brand new bridge.
The Canadian side of the road was rather boring all the way to Toronto, just straight highway with relatively much traffic. Around Toronto the traffic became actually really heavy and slow, the last 10 kilometers took an hour.
In between the border and Toronto we had a quick one hour stop in London (they are really creative in naming their towns, basically all of them were named after their British siblings) in a market hall for some food. Not a bad looking city, at least if we had more time to explore.
In Toronto we stay on the North side of the city, in an Asian district in some kind of improvised guest house of a Chinese family. Big beautiful house and a quiet and nice looking district near a metro station, so nothing to complain. Tomorrow will be a Toronto exploring day, without any driving hopefully..
This was a long driving day. Somehow we always manage to plan the trips so that the driving distances become rather long, but on the other side it's nice to see the area and not just stay in the city. We stopped briefly at New Buffalo to see the beach of the Lake Michigan, drove through and had food in Kalamazoo and visited the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, finally ending up to a small hotel near Detroit. Nice small cities, reminding of some movies.
I updated the blog software a bit, to make it work better on modern computers and phones. Should be much more usable now.
This short trip to the US and Canada works as an excellent test of the updated software. This was mostly booked to collect some Finnair points before tier expiration and to see the northern part of the US which we haven't visited yet. Actually I have never been to Canada either.
Finnair has reasonable internet connection nowadays, so the flight went quickly by working all the way. The border crossing into the US at Chicago was actually surprisingly fast, it didn't take more than 15 minutes to cross the border without any questions and pick up the bags. Getting our rental car took a bit longer, but we still made it to the hotel less than two hours after landing.
