Happy Fourth of July

Here was our plan for how today should go:
-Wake up
-Go to the grocery store and get cup cake papers
-Make lunch
-Make Freedom Cupcakes
-Eat dinner
-Go down to the Navy Pier to watch fireworks
-Come  home set off some of our own fireworks
-Go to bed

Well as you can imagine it didn't go exactly as planned.
This morning things were going great. We went to the grocery store and got the rest of the stuff to make cupcakes and we got fireworks. We get home and decide to make lunch and realize that we have no bread, and almost no other kind of food to eat....
So what better way to celebrate America than going to McDonald's for lunch. Ok.... so not too bad... so far

We make Freedom Cupcakes, which were delicious.

We all got ready to go downtown thinking if we got there an hour and a half early we would have no problem getting near the Navy Pier or along lake somewhere to watch the fireworks. (This was our first mistake)

We found ourselves in a mob of thousands of other people trying to make their way to the Navy Pier. It felt incredibly like trying to get into Times Square for New Years. The traffic was a mess, there were people everywhere, whole streets were closed down. As we get like a block away from the Pier we just hear this police officer yelling, "They shut it down! Move west! The fire marshal shut it down!" I was pretty convinced they would't actually shut down all of the Navy Pier and not do fireworks just because their was too many people. So we just started walking north. Every police officer that we came across were all saying the same thing, "Navy Pier was too full" "You can't go past this point" "They aren't letting anyone into the pier" etc... (It actually sounded and felt a lot like those end of the world movies where thousands of people are all moving together trying to get to some place that is supposedly safe only to get turned away) (Note: I looked it up, over 100,000 people were turned away from the Navy Pier and the fireworks show).

Finally we found a street that wasn't blockaded by the police and we walked all the way to Lake Shore Drive (just about a block or so north of the Navy Pier. And the only place we could sit to watch fireworks was on the median in the middle of the highway... So we sat up on the median along with hundreds of other people.

Tons of people were crossing the highway trying to get to the other side to sit, and I swear it looked like zombies. Groups of people would just run out in front of the cars, climb over the other median, run out in front of the cars going to the other way and climb of the next cement wall and then drop down onto the sidewalk below. It was insane.

I tried to take pictures of it, but my camera isn't great so this was the best I could do.

People lining the median next to us. 

Waiting for the fireworks to start. 

People running across the street to jump over the other median. 

All the people on the other side of us. 

Fireworks! 

So we ended up have a relatively good view of the fireworks. The trees were blocking all the low ones but everything else but pretty good.

After the fireworks were over we decided to find a bar and wait for things to die down before we headed home. We found this bar called Pippin's and we sat outside and drank some beers.

We got up to leave and started walking towards the Red Line station. There was all this commotion and a couple of really loud bangs... which could have just been fireworks (or something else... anything really, we have no idea). Anyway, there was a ton of police right at the corner where the Red Line station is. It was insane how many cops there were. They were making sure that people kept moving, but none of them were saying what happened. So we go down into the station and there is close to 200 people in the station milling around and yelling at each other and still even more cops. So Megan, Travis, and I just went through the turn stiles and got on a train and went home.

If anyone can figure out what happened we would love to know (It was on the corner of State St. and Chicago Ave).

Anyway after we got home safely and entered good old Albany Park that sounded similar to a war zone because of the incredible amount of fireworks going off consistently. We decided to light some of our own fireworks, which turned out to all be the kind that smoke... should have read the labels better.

Megan lighting her first firework

Travis and of course.... his puppet! 

Everything aside, I would say it ended up being a pretty successful 4th of July away from home in a new city:
Made freedom cupcakes
Saw fireworks
Drank some beer
Got the shit scared out of us
Lit our own fireworks
Got safely into bed as it sounded like the world was ending around us.