Saturday August 13: Joilet, Illinois

Yesterday was another bike ride in between the rain that seemed to end just to start again!

The Museum of Natural History, the Shedd Aquariium and the Alder Planetarium where all within a 10 minute ride from Burnham Harbor where we were docked.


This totem pole was very interesting and tells the story of the big beaver. Click on the picture to see it enlarged.




Steve decided he was game for seeing the aquarium even though we'd been there before (I think we've seen the aquarium in every city we've ever been to!).

This is the line - Really?? A Friday afternoon? Can't imagine what it's like on a weekend. Moral of the story is, if you intend to go to any of these places - buy tickets online ahead of time!!

So we left early this morning - the plan was to be through Chicago and headed down the river before all of the tour boats and water taxis made the river a crazy place (as it was yesterday afternoon).

It was a good plan :-) The Chicago Harbor Lock has the coolest lock buiding - designed to look like a ship. Very fun!


Through the lock (drop was maybe two feet), we started under the first of many bridges as the river runs right through the center of downtown.

There are so many neat buildings that it was hard to know where to look!

Steve found the Tiny Hatt place interesting and we tried to figure out what kind of place it was - thinking something like actual hats only super expensive - found out it's a bar - of course .....

The Tiny Hatt

Another fun water fountain (below) - I thought it a bit strange since it can be viewed only from the river;

Another fountain.

Chicago definitely does love it's fountains!!














Pymird shaped, gold trimmed, round - lots of different kinds of buildings!

I think my head was on a swivel just looking around :-)

Steve did a great job capturing everything!

Good-bye Chicago!

It wasn't long before we were on the southwestern outskirts of downtown and the river became very industrial.


Barges loaded with grain, stones, scrap metal. You name it - it was on a barge.

With a pusher tug shoving them around. We finally met one and we were thinking 'and you want us to go where???'

The tow captains are very patient with us "pleasure craft" - that's PC's for short - as they called and asked us to wait wait  for a few minutes. Which we did of course :-) And then were able to move on past them.

Our second trip through the fish barrier (for the Asian carp) with no issues.

We did notice a new sign though - apparently there were issues with freeloading carp trying to get past the barrier!

We were back to locks again. This time the huge ones for the large and long tows to pass through. There were Su Sueno and us alone in this huge lock!

Best thing? The floating bollards are back so all we need is a single line in the center of the boat! Sure make locking through easier ....

We ended the day at a very nice park in Joilet - with nice facilities - no charge! And power to boot.

It was quite a bit warmer now that we are away from the openness of Lake Michigan. Very happy with the new air conditioner we installed in New York.

Tomorrow we'll be off to Seneca and then on to Ottawa from there.