After leaving the Midwest and St Louis we continued to make our way east to Chicago as part of our epic Coast to Coast journey across the United States. Our original contact we were to meet in Chicago, a friend of Marcus’, had to go out of town for work for the week we were passing through, but one of his friends offered to put up three strangers from New Zealand and look after us for a couple of days. That seemed very gracious of him, thankfully his job seemed so flexible about whether he went or not…
Chandon ended up being the ‘funniest’ guy I meet in the States, he was so excited we were there and that he had people to go out with on both Wednesday and Thursday. He showed us a couple of really busy bars not far from the world famous Wrigley Field – home of the Chicago Cubs. The places were probably busy because theu had $1 beers all night long!
It’s not all about partying and being hung-over when visiting Chicago though, we did manage to check out the city and even made it to the top of the Willis Tower (former highest building in the world and now second highest building in North America).
After our all too brief few days in Chicago we said farewell to Chandon, with a few tears and plenty of appreciation for the awesome time that we had, we now headed to Columbus Ohio to stay with Marcus’ friend for the night. The drive would take us across Indiana; which had the nicest and best kept farmland I had seen so far.
There isn’t a lot to do in Columbus, but we’d come mainly because we wanted to visit the Wright-Patterson Air Force Museum before continuing onto Washington DC; which was an eight hour drive away so we had a big day ahead of us.
The Wright-Patterson Air Force Museum in Dayton, Ohio, is famous for being the testing grounds in the early 1900’s for all but the first three flights done by the Wright brothers (the first three being in Kittyhawk, North Carolina).
The Air Force Museum was nothing short of amazing, four massive hangers containing pretty much every Air Force aircraft ever, and everything was in MINT condition. The aircraft in they have there is literally worth billions! After I visit the Air and Space Museum in Washington DC and the Kennedy Space Center, there probably won’t be anything the United States has flown I won’t have seen!
