Summer Vacation Part 7: The End with The Wall

This is my last post about something vacation-y that I'm spending a bunch of money on to have fun this summer. My Aunt Susie and I went to see Paul McCartney last summer at Wrigley Field in Chicago. We had so much fun we decided to see a concert every summer together. She let me pick the one for this year, and I chose The Wall performed by Roger Waters at Wrigley again.

Our mini vacation started with a trip on the South Shore Train from Dune Park all the way to the end of the line (Millennium).

We then caught a taxi and checked in at our hotel- Best Western Plus River North. It was rated three stars on Priceline, and it was an okay hotel. It was decorated nicely, but the hallway smelled funny.  The place seemed to get my allergies going as well.

Our hotel room also had a nice view...

We were just down the block from the Rainforest Cafe and the Hard Rock Cafe. We choose to eat at Hard Rock Cafe for lunch.

I also bought a t-shirt (which is a tad bit small for motivation) and some earrings.

At least you can wear earring no matter what size you are!

The location of the hotel was great since we could easily walk to Michigan Avenue and go shopping which we did before concert.

Only $15 for a pair of Levi's from the Levi store!

On our way back we passed a Subway, so we got that for dinner and headed back to the hotel for a nap.

After our nap and changing clothes, we hopped on the red line. We actually kind of knew what we were doing on the subway this time which was nice.

The shirt I wore to the concert. I got a lot of compliments on it.

Once we got to Wrigley, we went straight in and found our seats which were pretty darn close to the top. The view was really nice since we were in the middle of the park. If we go back again to see a concert, I will definitely be getting seats here again.

As you keep reading, I talk about "grandma and grandpa." I didn't realize that grandma (the lady with the tie dye and bandanna) was in my picture until I wrote this post!

I didn't take a picture of this, but I did have a bottle of water to hydrate and a hot pretzel to keep the blood sugar from getting too low before the concert started.

As we were waiting for the concert to start, we were people watching. The crowd was quite different from our concert last year and interesting to watch. We had grandma and grandpa sitting down a few rows from us who were wearing tie-dye shirts, long hair, and bandannas and looked like they never left Woodstock.

As the concert started, I tried to take some pictures, but they just didn't turn out well. My aunt thinks she might have gotten a few good ones, so I'll try to get them from her sometime. I will put a few of my blurry ones up though.

Some really neat things from the show were...

• An airplane flying down on a string from the top of roof over the audience to crash into the wall and burst into flames which was really cool. 
• Roger Waters started and ended the show dressed up as a dictator with a uniform, glasses, and red arm band with a logo with two hammers on it. He even shot into the audience with a toy gun at the end.

• As the songs played, there were images and videos projected onto the wall to go with songs. Some of the most moving images were pictures and stories of people (children too) who were killed in some kind of warfare.

• During the first half of the show the wall was slowly being built up brick by brick until there was a full wall by intermission. During the second half of the show the wall came back down again.
• For "Another Brick in the Wall Part 2", there were children on stage singing the "children's part" and fighting a huge evil teacher robot.

• For the song "Mother" he performed a duet with himself. He played along with a video of himself performing the song in 1980.

• The pig was alive and revamped. It was a huge balloon pig (about the size of a bus) that was black with red and white "big brother" type slogans all over it. It floated over the audience that was seated in the field and eventually crashed in the back after floated around for several songs.
• If you would like to read a concert review and/or see the set list, visit this link.
• If you go to YouTube and type in Roger Waters Wrigley Field 2012, you can watch some videos that show what I'm talking about.

After the show, we made our way though the sea of people at Wrigley and again through another sea of people to get to the subway and back to the hotel. We chit chatted a bit, got ready for bed, and were asleep by 1:00ish.

The next morning we got breakfast at the restaurant in the hotel. Naughty me got a Belgium waffle, but I have no photo as proof. ;)

We then walked down to Bloomingdale's to check out all expensive home stuff we can't afford. When we got to the top floor with the furniture we found a table that was set. It had name cards in frames at each plate, but only one frame was facing the aisle. The name was Shirley. That has meaning to us, because my Aunt Shirley (Susie's sister) passed away a few years ago (way too young due to cancer). It was kind of weird since it isn't a common name, so I checked out the other names and they were all common names like John. I'm not much for signs, but this one did get to me a bit.

After our shopping trip, we went back to the hotel for one last thing. We wanted to check out the rooftop deck. It had a nice view, so we both took some pictures and bid Chicago goodbye.