Beer, Burgers and Boats

We recently celebrated the Hubby's birthday and as his gift I got him an entire day with his wife. Horrible, right? To make up for it, I planned a trip to a Chicago brewery, lunch at a gourmet burger/beer place and an architectural boat tour of Chicago :)

We stared the day off at Half Acre Brewery in what I think is consitered the Lincoln Square neighborhood. It is a super small operation that creates some awesome beer. The tour is free, though they do require that you make a reservation in advance....and the best part? Free beer, the whole tour....pitchers and pitchers of free and yummy beer!

{this Gossamer and the Daisy Cutter were my favorites, but I like lighter beers}

{one of the partners and our tour guide...but I forgot him name. Oops! The best part of the tour was that it was like you were just hanging out with friends, checking out their brewery. They made you feel so comfortable and you didn't feel like you were imposing in their space at all. You can tell that they really like what they do, are proud of their product and like having people come check them out. I recommend it to anyone looking for some free beer something fun and interesting to do}

{plus, any place that puts this on their sign that you see when you're leaving....well, they're good in my book}

After the tour, we walked across the street to the Bad Apple, where the beer list is larger then the menu. And on that menu? Some delicious and awesomely unique burgers.

{beer list on top, menu on bottom....yum!}

Hubby's sister Christine and her husband Pat met us at Bad Apple, which worked perfectly. Since I am no longer able to enjoy some yum yum yumola fried food because of my gall bladder removal, my plan to indulge like crazy with Hubs didn't work so well. They ordered the cheese curds (which I heard were awesome) and got to try some of their gourmet french fry flavors with the Hubs. I had a veggie burger, which was good, but I wish like hell I could have tried some fries :) Over all the vote was that this place was good, and while I wouldn't drive down just for it, Bad Apple is across the street from Half Acre, so I'd recommend it just for the proximity.

After lunch, we headed back towards downtown to take the boat tour. We hopped on the Ft. Dearborn and were the last ones on the boat. The whole top deck was packed with people, so we decided to head to the lower deck to have some privacy. And privacy we had....we were the only ones down there! So we pulled up some chairs right to the bow and had an awesome view and felt like we were on our own private tour! We took the tour with Chicago Line Boat Tours, and for $37 per person, you had a 90 minute tour and unlimited soda, coffee and cookies. A little more expensive than some of the others that I looked at, but we went with it any way. I would honestly take an architectural tour again, but try a different company to see if they pointed out things that we had missed previously. It was fun, and I would totally recommend it.

Now, one thing that we didn't pay for was being on a live movie set :) I found out in the morning that Transformers 3 was filming downtown and head lots of reports of skydivers jumping off buildings and whatnot.  I figured that filming was just going on early in the morning (before word of mouth spread and people would watch) but through out the day there were 2 helicopters flying pretty low around downtown. As we got to one section of the river, we were stopped by a bunch of police boats blocking the river.

As we waited, the sound of the helicopters got closer and closer....until one came out of no where, dropped 4 guys in flying squirel suits who went between the Willis Tower and whatever was next to it and down to the ground. It was seriously one of the craziest things I've ever seen! It was so fast...those guys are crazy. I may actually want to see the movie now, just to see how they incorporate that shot :)

{they continued filming on the lakefront, with the black helicopter manuvering and being filmed by a bigger white helicopter.....that black dot over Navy Pier was the one being filmed}

Fun day, huh? I'm thinking I should do this more often...tons of touristy stuff in Chicago and the Chicago-land area - some for adults and some for kids, reivew them and put them on another blog. Wouldn't that be cool? LOL - a girl can dream :)