Today turned out to be a long day even though we only went to the Museum of Science & Industry but it was well worth spending nearly an hour getting there on the subway and a bus.
From the outside, this building doesn't look that big but instead of walking up to the front of it there is a small brick building that you enter then go down in an elevator, I think most of this place is buried underground.
You are first greeted with a Burlington Zephyr train, this is a real one that you can go in, then through the pay desk to the main part.
There's far too much to go into detail here but the most impressive part is a real German U boat from the second world war, they do tours around the inside of it as well for an extra fee but I didn't bother with that.
On the way out of this hall there is a short time lapse video of how they got it in here by basically putting it in a barge and towing it through the Great Lakes then onto a massive trailer for a mile or so to where they dug the biggest hole you have ever seen, then it was lowered it into the hole and they put a roof over it.
Next, it was time to explore some of the other halls, the earth sciences hall is where they have created a real tornado in the middle of the floor.
There were all sorts of stuff in here to play with, you could even go inside something that looked a bit like a phone box where you can experience 80 miles an hour wind.
Moving on from there the next part was all about transportation from push bikes to planes they even had a massive model of Chicago City with the trains running around, the back part of the model shows how rail freight is moved from here to the west coast with working model trains.
There was plenty of other things to do in here and I think we spent about 5 hours in total in there before catching the bus back to The Loop to get the Red Line train. With hindsight it would have been better to get on the bus, I really didn't think you could cram so many people on a subway train but I was wrong. It was like something you see in Japan when they push people through the doors to get more on even though they are every 3 minutes. So it was a bit of a bun fight to get off the train when we got to our station but the surprising thing was it was still hotter on the street than it was on the subway.
By now the temperature was about 35 centigrade and we were both glad the hotel room had air-conditioning so flopped there for the rest of the evening.
