From Pittsburgh to greener pastures

Thursday morning rolls around and I finally have Bowgan ready to actually take off on this adventure. As I am putting the of my stuff in the car, genius boy instantly blows the radio/cirgar lighter fuse to the Honda, Im a decent talker on a car ride, but no music = problem on an upcoming 20 hours in 5 days. Anyways, we made due with what we had and ultimately got the car taken care of in Chicago.
The Pittsburgh move out went relatively smooth and I feel no remorse about leaving that city behind. Its not that I didnt enjoy college, but there is more to life than getting hammered 5 days a week. Im down to just 2 now...

After a beautiful seafood dinner that Ms Anna Hunka treated us to, we took off for the Windy City. Our destination was a cheap hostel in Lincoln Park outside of Chicago. I have always heard Europeans raving about up their hostels, but wasnt sure what to expect. Much to my surprise, the hostel was a really nice place to find stuff to do in the city, and people to do it with, We met an Austrian guy named Thomas who came out with us for a couple nights. While he didnt seem to enjoy much beer that was Austrian tasting??? he could hold his own, and we got absolutely trashed. This is reflected in the video Bowgan will post of the next afternoon after a really rough lunch where I managed to order a sandwich and immediately ask it to be boxed.

So Chicago's beach aspect with Lake Michigan was amazing, and the city is very clean and bars were fun. We made sure to do some touristy stuff as well, like the giant buildings and the pier fireworks. Im a little upset I didnt get to check out the live blues music the city has to offer, but I will get over it. Overall I am giving it a 13.5/16. Two points deducted for it being expensive, and the other .5 lost for it being uncomfortably cold during winter.

We decided to remain in Chicago for the World Cup final on Sunday which was an awesome game for any soccer fan. Unfortunately, they hardly exist in the country (at least not American born). Since we had some time to kill prior, we wandered around the set of Transformers 3 that was being filmed downtown at the time. Pretty cool stuff. Pictures will follow.

I should probably mention that many of the pictures (at least the nice ones) are generally accompanied with a turtle figure. This little guy has now been officially named "C.Ash" and is a very important member of the trip. I thought the idea of only posting pictures of him traveling the country and posting on the blog from the Cash's (turtles) perspective was hilarious.....but it is also a pain in the ass to focus on when you got Bison to slay. So the lack of maturity wins out again. He is pretty funny in some pics though.

It had been about six days since we had played Texas Hold;em, so we decided to just bee line over to Mt. Rushmore and see if we could catch the sunrise there because 30 miles away is the historic, gambling town of Deadwood South Dakota. hahaha quite an interesting town...