Now I went to the planetarium recently and have no special desire to return, but I do enjoy spending time with friends, enjoying the autumn weather and seeing more of Chicago, so I joined Noelle and Guillermina for the ride.
We met at Promontory Point and began by heading south, away from the sun. We pretty soon left the more popular section of the trail, but it remained wide and well-maintained. But then, more or less without warning, it simply stopped (Noelle was about to take us riding directly through a fence). Fortunately there was a bike path on the road, so we were able to continue south into SOUTH CHICAGO.
Neptune was in Rainbow Beach Park, which has a beautiful view of the Chicago skyline. Although it's easy to think of the shoreline as running north-south, it's actually distinctly tilted NW-SE, so the view is more side on than one might imagine.
South Chicago has wide roads with very few cars, if the one main road we were travelling on on a Saturday afternoon is a fair representation. I think the area is experiencing a lull between deindustrialisation and planned redevelopment. There are many intersections without streets to go with them: it's easy to know where the streets will be if more building happens in future, because of Chicago's grid system.
After a bit of confusion about the right way to go (don't put the one without the smartphone at the front of the group! If we'd continued the slightly longer way we were headed, we would have crossed the 95th St bridge made famous by the Blues brothers), we headed across the bridge into the EAST SIDE. This felt like a reasonably buzzing satellite community: it reminded me of one of the outlying towns in the Boston area (not necessarily because it had any resemblance to Greater Boston in particular, but perhaps just because that's the only big city in which I've lived for a long period of time, enough to get to know the shape of the city. I've now officially visited all the lakeside neighbourhoods of Chicago.
Calumet Park, home to Pluto, was full of boys playing two codes of football: there seemed to be more people in that park than we saw evidence of living anywhere near where we were riding. We took a group shot and the requisite selfies, then turned north.
The ride back felt a little longer because the breeze (solar wind??) was against us. We passed (as we had passed, but I had not really noticed on the way south) a yard full of strange looking items. Noelle also wondered what they were, and described them as looking like enormous music stands. My guess had been that they were tanks stands or similar, whereas she correctly (I tracked the location down with some help from Google) identified them as boat stands. I guess that's where people put their boats before the lake freezes. We also went fairly close to St Michael the Archangel's Church, an impressive church built in the Polish style.
Guillermina left us at Uranus, back at Promontory Point, but Noelle and I continued towards the inner planets, which are of course much closer together. It was a pretty quick ride along, past Saturn, Jupiter and the asteroid belt. There was some big concert going on on Northerly Island: I think it was Farm Aid.
Before we knew it, we were at Museum Campus and dismounted to hit the rocky planets by foot. Mars was hiding behind the aquarium, but Noelle had a map and we finished in plenty of time for me to head home and Skype with family.
I had an amusing little encounter in the lift on my way back up to my apartment: a couple of people got in and told me that I look like Harrison Ford (a younger version). I'm not sure that I agree, but I did decide to cut my hair the next day!
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