We're off! Four weeks 🥳! First stop, Chicago Illinois for the wedding of Kevin Morgan and Dawn Barcelona. Eoin is with us (Eoin is the groom's brother and Noah's bestie since first grade). Since we were on the same flight, we picked Eoin up on our way to the airport (in a Lyft where the driver was rubbing his eyes, pounding a Monster drink, and tailgating like a madman) and took him with us to the new Chase Lounge at San Diego airport. Very chichi. We had to tell Eoin that this was special for us too. Not our usual kickoff to travel.

How wonderful to be treated by friends as if we were family. Twenty-five years, more than half of which was spent raising children, will do that to people.

Dawn & Kevin's wedding was just about as magical (and relaxed) as you could ever imagine. These are two people who know who they are, both as individuals and as a couple. The festivities took place in an old renovated firehouse. The ceremony was on a garden patio with the reception inside the firehouse. The bride and groom entered their reception from, where else, down the fire pole. So much whimsy. So much fun. And the food was A-M-A-Z-I-N-G!

Chicago played the perfect backdrop to Dawn & Kevin's wedding. We'd been once before when Wy and Rachel lived here for a year, but it seemed to unveil itself in a new way (true of most big cities, I'm sure). There's so much to see and learn.

It struck me as kind of amazing that this old, deservedly revered, cosmopolitan and economic powerhouse (the third largest city in the U.S. behind New York and Los Angeles with a population north of 2.7m people and a city-wide GDP of about $900b) sits right in the middle of the country, when development seemed to huddle closer to larger waterways. It turns out that in the mid-1800s the Illinois & Michigan Canal was dug between the Great Lakes and the Mississippi River creating a gateway to national and international trade.

Like all of America's major cities, Chicago was built through the labor of a hungry workforce comprised of domestic migrants and international immigrants. Mail Order shopping was actually invented in Chicago (you're welcome Amazon), by the catalog company Montgomery Ward. Sears Roebuck and Spiegel were also founded in Chicago

The variety in architecture in Chicago is delightful and a testament to both how well the old is preserved an how the new is contextual. (I learned that on the architectural boat tour.) I particularly enjoyed the exquisite mosaics as both public art and in many of the older buildings, particularly stunningly in the main branch library and on the college campuses of Loyola and Northwestern. I wondered out loud why I never considered going to school further away from home. "You wouldn't have to ask yourself that if you grew up on this side of the country" our friend and sightseeing companion Ian told me. He was raised in New Hampshire and the bitterness of the winters appear to still be deep in his bones.

For reasons still totally unclear to me one of the biggest Bahai Houses in the country is in Evanston, a fancy suburb just north of downtown. Weird, but also wonderful.

Baha'i House

Chicago is the home of several novel engineering feats, including a project in the early 1900s that raised the downtown buildings a single story to install one of the first of its kind city-wide sewage systems, and a project that reversed the flow of the Chicago River so that sewage would stop going into Lake Michigan, the source of the city's drinking water.

Chicago is home to the first gay rights organization, formed in 1924. The roots of their inclusivity are still evident in how trans- and queer-friendly the city is reputed to be today.

Chicago's most recent claim to fame is of course, the new pope, Leo XIV, the Catholic Church's first American pope (a man who refreshingly channels Jesus when he speaks), and behind the pope, Illinois Governor JB Pritzker, a billionaire who talks like a teamster, and by all accounts is pretty kick ass.