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Monday, August 12, 2013

staycation

Every summer my mom puts one weekend aside that is considered our "family weekend." We all have relatively busy summer schedules between working, doctors appointments and spending time with friends. During this family weekend we embark on a staycation. Yup... a staycation... which is otherwise known as a "stay-at-home vacation." Usually this means staying at your house, but doing leisurely activities and taking some personal time off rather than doing work and chores. It's basically an extended mental break. Luckily I'm from the Northwest suburbs of Chicago so going to the city is only a 45 minute drive away. Rather than have a staycation at our actual home in the burbs, my family and I can drive to downtown Chicago, rent a hotel room for the night and explore the city for a relatively cheap mini-vacation. We book a hotel for Saturday night and spend Saturday/Sunday exploring the city and shopping. Not only is it a great bonding experience, but it's nice to get away from home even if only for a couple of days!


family lunch at Quartino
This past weekend was my family's staycation. We drove up to the city at around 10:15 on Saturday morning and arrived at The Acme Hotel around 12:30 (there had been a lot of traffic on the highway). We were all hungry and grumpy by the time we got there so we immediately went to lunch. A good meal always makes people happy, right? We went to an Italian restaurant called Quartino Ristorante & Wine Bar. My mom ordered a salad, a pasta dish and two steak plates for us to split and I have to say it was all amazing. The meal hit the spot and definitely put us in a better mood for our afternoon of shopping.

photobooth with mommy at Top Shop
Shopping downtown is always so much better than shopping in a mall. It's crazy and busy, yet calm and beautiful. The stores are more grandios, have a wider selection and even though the sales tax is higher than at home, the atmosphere downtown is just so much more sophisticated. It almost makes me feel like I'm in the Sex and the City (minus the awesome job, fabulous boyfriend and jaw-dropping closet full of clothes). We focused our attention around Michigan Avenue and went into all of our usual go-to stores. My family went to a lot of stores together, but we split up (my mom and I/Justin and my dad) to shop at more gender oriented stores. My mom and I hit up Nordstrom, Top Shop and Forever 21 while my brother and dad went to Nike Town, Columbia and Ralph Lauren.

YUM
After shopping we went back to the hotel so we could all take quick showers and then we walked one block over to Osteria Via Stato for dinner. I had Parmesan Chicken and broccolini which was delectable! We had no plans for after dinner because my dad and brother had refused to go to the Taylor Swift concert (she was playing at Soldier Field that night) and the tickets for the show Flashdance were too expensive for horrible seats. Instead of going back to the hotel we decided to walk around Navy Pier to grab a quick dessert, ride the famously ginormous ferris wheel and watch the fire works.

view from the ferris wheel
The line for the ferris wheel was about 30 minutes and my brother and I didn't want to go on it badly enough to wait that long, but my mom insisted that we ride it . Not wanting to start an argument, we waited patiently in line for our turn. Even though I hate heights I ended up being fine and it was my mom who was miserable during the ferris wheel. She kept her eyes closed the whole time because she was nauseous and was practically counting down the seconds until we could get off. Justin and I begged to go back to the hotel because we were both exhausted, but my mom once again insisted we stay for fire works. The fire works were beyond lame so I just scrolled through my Instagram and Twitter feed waiting until we could go back to the hotel.

At around 10:45 pm we finally were in our hotel room. I changed into my pajamas, flipped on the TV and then Justin and I watched about 3 hours of the most addictive TV I've ever seen called Ghost Adventures. I won't get too into it, but it's about these guys who go to paranormal places and communicate with the spirits who live there. It was a mixture of creepy, cool and OMG. Around 1 am we decided to hit the hay because we had a big day ahead of us.

sibling love on the Chicago River
Bright and early the next morning (it was actually only 10am, but that's early for me) we woke up, packed our bags and checked out of the hotel. Then we drove about 20 minutes to get to the Chicago River North Avenue location of Kayak Chicago. My mom had bought a groupon online for our family to go kayaking on the Chicago River. After a quick lesson on how to actually kayak we were on our way. We kayaked for a total of two hours. Although it was really cool to kayak the Chicago River, the scenery was mostly commercial buildings and the river itself was disgustingly polluted. We could have kayaked further and gotten "breathtaking" views (according to the workers of Kayak Chicago), but we were all too tired to continue on so we took a few pictures with as much skyline as we could see and then paddled back to where we started. It was a super fun experience all in all.

my brunch at Yolk
Our staycation ended with a delicious brunch at Yolk. I ordered pancakes with oatmeal and blueberries mixed into the batter and honey and bananas sprinkled on top. It was the perfect way to end our family weekend! Even though my family gets on each other's nerves a lot and we can fight like nobody's business, at the end of the day they're the people that will always be there for me and that I love the most! I'm happy my mom forced us to do a family weekend and even happier that we had as much fun as we did!