Jennifer's 365 Project

We did a loop around Millennium Park this afternoon.
 

He overcame his fear of crossing this today, and ended up going though it several times. I doused his hands in hand sanitizer as extra precaution, although there are no cases of covid-19 yet in Michigan.

It's a beach day today! We spent a few hours at Millennium Beach enjoying the sun and the water.

In the morning we headed out to Millennium Beach. It's a sunny day and perfect beach weather. The water was a little chilly, but Quinn still had fun.

With temperatures soaring into the mid-90's, we decided today was a good day to take Quinn to the beach. We took him to the beach at Millennium Park, which is just 10 minutes or so from our house.

When we arrived their the splash pad was under maintenance, but with the beach right there we let him play by the water.
He enjoyed me taking him out where it was deeper and dipping him into the water. As long as his face never got wet he was fine. I'm pretty fussy myself like that, so I understand how he feels.
He had so much fun that he didn't really want to stop to eat. He did, and was obviously hungry with how quickly he scarfed down his food, but there was no whining or fussing like usual when he's hungry.

I'm really looking forward to taking him back again.

In the morning I dropped Chris off with Quinn at Tanger Outlet and I went to recycle some old computer parts and dead monitors I've had cluttering the house for a long while. I know we didn't get everything loaded into the car we should have (there are bins in the basement I'm sure have old stuff we need to toss), but it was nice to get rid of a trunkload of crap we no longer need.
After I picked up everyone from the outlet mall we went to Millennium Park to see the new boardwalk. There is a boardwalk that connects the loop around the lake and an older unpaved trail.

The boardwalk was much shorter than we thought it was going to be, but Quinn had a fun time running back and forth on it, so the trip was worth it.

We took a long walk this afternoon at Millennium Park this afternoon. I'm not actually a fan of the park, but it's a change of pace from the parks that we normally walk at. Most of the path is open. There are hardly any trees that actually cover parts of the path. I'm assuming because they leveled virtually all of it when they were building the park.

Anyway, it was a good long walk around the mini-lakes and we both managed to get sunburned. But it was worth it. I miss weather in the 50s and 60s we should be having this time of year, but I guess 80 degrees is better than 30 and snow.

In the evening we wandered around downtown Chicago until we stumbled across Beef 'n' Brandy, a nice little diner with tasty food. After dinner we walked up to Graham Crackers Comics and headed over to Millennium Park. Chris wanted to see a few things we missed last year over there and I wanted to take more photos. I was on the hunt for Lord of the Rings Online look-alike areas. It's really hard to find stuff like that in urban areas. I'm not really sure why I look. I think its just a game I play with myself.
Anyway, we walked along through the park a bit and back down Michigan Avenue toward our hotel. I spent most of the time wandering off and ignoring Chris snapping photos of random things and messing with settings on my camera because of the fading light. I tend to wander off a lot when I have a mission, like hunting for cool stuff to photograph.
There's a lot of nice areas all over the place, and the parks looks a lot different than it did April of last year. What a difference spring makes in terms of color and wildlife.

The weather is supposed to turn cold, which means getting out and enjoying a mid-40 degree kind of day. Chris and I headed over to Millennium Park. It's closed for traffic during the season but you can walk around on their paved paths and what not.
It was after noon, which meant a blinding sun shining down most of the way. It made for some interesting shots of the ice.

I've added the latest photos to the Millennium Park folder I have on flickr. Below is a quick slideshow. The first few are from the summer, as you can tell by the green.

Today I was determined to ride Kent Trails. I checked out the map online - verified it was open. I got home and packed a dinner and drove out to John Ball Zoo for one of the access points. Thats when I stumbled across "closed" signs and an updated map (that had not made its way to the interwebs) indicating that the northern portion of the trail was closed.

So I revised and decided to hit up Millennium Park, ride around there and if I had time (and it didnt rain) I would ride Kent Trails as well.

Well I never did get on Kent Trails. I spent waaay too much time taking pictures and goofing around at the park. Still, here's a shot of me putting my headphones back in after taking pics of an odd structure off the path.